


Bits and Pieces

by alexiel-neesan (alyyks)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Space, Big Brother Derek, Canon-Typical Violence, Coma, Curses, Dead People, Gen, Hospitals, Human Derek Hale, Illnesses, Magical Derek Hale, Nogitsune Trauma, Pack Family, Panic Attacks, Post-Season/Series 03, Suicidal Thoughts, The Alpha Pack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 08:39:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4215162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyyks/pseuds/alexiel-neesan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abandoned works released into the wild. Each chapter is a different story, each is tagged in notes at the beginning of each chapter. </p><p>Contains, not in that order: a space AU, a Laura-Lives AU, a different approach to season 3, lots of Derek, lots of pack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Post-Possession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Immediately post-3b, a look at the changed dynamics in the pack and the consequences of possessions.
> 
> Nogitsune-related trauma, pack, Big Brother Derek

  
  
  
When— When it’s done, when the Nogistune is out of the picture, Stiles screams.  
  
Stiles screams for two days straight, voice gone and eyes red by the end, his mouth open and still he screams.  
  
No-one leaves him alone. They evade his feeble attempts to kick them away, uncoordinated and feverish. They help him hold his head to their hearts, his hands clutching tee-shirts, henleys, blouses— help him hear that they are alive, they are here, and so is he, awake and alive. His mouth, still, is open on a scream, his eyes fixed on the distance.  
  
His first two words are “Dad? Scott?” Derek only hears them, because he has Stiles’s head pillowed on his chest at the moment. Lydia is here too, seated at Stiles’ desk, going through a book of lore Mrs Yukimura brought Scott. A gesture of good faith, she had called it, and the reaction of the pack, of Kira, behind closed doors, had been unrest, _too little too late_.  
  
Derek answers that Scott is fine, that the Sheriff is fine— Scott passed out on the couch downstairs, where Lydia forced him to go sleep else he sleeps on the floor of Stiles’ room, and the Sheriff called to the station to kick Agent McCall out. Finally, and finally.  
  
And finally Stiles closes his eyes for more than a blink, and lets go, and sleeps.  
  
They choose the Stilinskis’ house because Stiles knows it, because it has his pillow, because Derek’s loft is a graveyard, because the McCall’s house has Agent McCall. They choose the Stilinskis’ house for its proximity to the woods for the werewolves to run and shift their emotions away, for its discreet neighbors, for the fact they all know the house as one of theirs now. The Sheriff insisted. He said he wanted to see all the kids safe, not just his.  
  
Melissa is on shift, was on shift, and in the moment she wasn’t she was here too. Isaac and Allison went with Chris to the Argents’ apartment. Kira argued with her parents for what felt like hours in the kitchen, her mother visibly uncomfortable at being in the den of wolves, Kira clearly uncomfortable with leaving with them back to their house. She stated her win the end, using the Sheriff’s armchair as bed.  
  
Stiles wakes with a scream, his hands twisted in fabric, fingers like claws. Derek can feel the long digits moving on his ribs, one after the other, faster and fast then slowing down, one-two-three-four to ten, over and over.  
  
Lydia moved over while Stiles dozed, sitting at the end of the bed with a piece of string in her hands. She has remarkable hands too, proportioned like a statue, that twisted and twisted in the string. Derek never played Cat’s Cradle, can’t recognize the shapes. Judging from Lydia’s readings and the books in Stiles’ room, there are strong possibilities that the shapes are magic.  
  
Stiles screams, still, mouth open and eyes red at the edges.  
  
“Scott’s awake,” Derek says, listening for movement downstairs.  
  
Stiles closes his mouth, closes his eyes. When Scott goes through the doorway, Stiles whimpers, tries to hide.  
  
“Stiles?”  
  
He whimpers and shakes, mumbles incoherently. It takes all three of them, Scott, Lydia, Derek, to coax him to open his eyes, to open his hands.  
 


	2. All in Due Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 1 AU, where Laura is alive, is an alpha, Peter's running around, and Derek is the one in a coma. Seen from Laura's perspective. 
> 
> Canon-typical violence, Alive Laura Hale, alternate universe, graphic depiction of violence, illness, dead bodies, coma.

Laura knocked on Melissa’s door at 9.45pm, two hours after their shifts had ended. She had never done that before. She hoped Melissa wasn’t asleep already, that she wouldn’t bother her—  
  
“Oh honey,” was all Melissa said, and Laura broke down and cried in the doorway.  
  
There she was, a twenty-six years old woman who lived with her manipulative uncle, a RN nurse, a woman whose brother had been in a coma for the past six years, orphaned at twenty, Alpha of a territory more than of a pack, and she was crying into Melissa McCall’s arms, her co-worker and the closest thing she had to a friend and mother figure now.  
  
“Oh my god,” Laura said, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know where that came from—“  
  
“Laura, I’m so sorry.”  
  
Laura was ready to cry again, at her voice, at the hand gripping hers. Melissa’s house felt like a home, the couch a bit lumpy and a cracking step going upstairs. The house Laura lived in had been designed by Peter, when they rebuilt the Hale house. Most of it looked like a catalogue, a show room. She still didn’t know what he was expecting to do with the space. She hadn’t been able to talk <em>talk</em> to him in six years.  
  
A body had been found last night in the Preserve. Half of one, tattoos sneaking up the legs. He had been ridiculously proud of his tattoos. He had added the Hale’s triskelion only a month ago, above his knee. He had been Wil Brown. He had been an omega who settled in Beacon Hills and Laura’s friend-sometimes-lover and now he was dead, cut in half.  
  
“I was going to stay the night with Derek,” she hiccuped. She had been to his room during her break, helping with his physical therapy to maintain wasting muscles, giving him the latest gossip straight from the ER. He had stared at the wall. Then the deputy coming in. Then identifying Wil.  
  
“You need a break. The couch folds out.”  
  
In the morning, the house smelled like werewolf. Like young, like fear. The only other person in was Scott.  
  
Oh, no.  
  
Laura knew Scott. In the last two years, she had gotten to know him a bit more. She paid him to stay with Derek and read to him, at least twice a month. She knew his friend Stiles, who she had babysat a couple times when she was a teenager, tagged along sometimes, even knew he went there on his own sometimes. She was okay with that. She tried her best to never leave Derek alone for long. Lone wolves didn’t fare well. She didn’t care what the doctors said, what Peter said. It had been six years, but her brother was a fighter, a werewolf. He was still healing, slowly but surely. He’d be Derek again someday.  
  
Scott had never seemed to find their situation strange. He was a good kid. When Alan, who she wasn’t sure was her Emissary the same way he had been her mother’s, asked if she’d knew of someone to be his assistant, she had asked Melissa, then Scott.  
  
Scott was long gone by the time she woke up. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t smelled the scent of pain and fear and werewolf when she had came in, or that she hadn’t heard anything during the night.  
  
There was another alpha in town, and Scott was a new werewolf. She told Derek, when she went to see him that day, and that was how everything started.  
  
+  
  
Wil had been found in the woods, in that nebulous zone between Preserve and her land. She didn’t know if they had found… the other half of him. She didn’t know if he had family, or any specifics for his funeral.  
  
It couldn’t be a coincidence that he had been killed within a day of Scott being bitten. There was another Alpha here, and he probably had killed her friend. Probably, as cutting someone in half was the hunters’ favorite way of killing her people— but there were no hunters here, unless they had followed that new alpha? She had too many suppositions, following wild leads in her head without any evidence.  
  
Maybe she’d bribe Stiles for information the police wouldn’t give her. She shook her head, sighed. There was no clear scent or evidence of passage in the woods. Even Wil’s blood was missing. She stopped for a moment, turning her head toward the setting sun. She’d have to talk to Peter, when he’d be back from Los Angeles and whatever he had had to do down there. Then she’d spend the night with Derek. There had been a slight catch in his breathing, when she had seen him in the morning— he was at an increased risk of pneumonia, even with his metabolism, between the burns in his lungs and laying down the majority of the time. He had had a bout of it last year, and she had spent every night he had been sick sleeping next to him with her hand on his chest, sucking in the pain he didn’t seem to feel.  
  
She sighed and opened her eyes.  
  
On the ground, between fallen leaves and mud, was a white inhaler.  
  
At the same moment, she caught a sound from upwind, voices, talking. She only caught a few words at first, more as the voices grew closer.  
  
“—at if it's like an infection? Like... my body is full of adrenaline before a shock or something…”  
  
“You know what, I actually think I heard it... It's a specific kind of infection.”  
  
Young voices, male, not used to threading lightly in the woods by the ruckus they made walking.  
  
“You're serious?”  
  
“Yeah. I think it's called: ‘lycanthropy.’”  
  
“What is that? Is that bad?”  
  
Oh, no. She knew those voices. She knew exactly who they were, and now she had an idea of what had happened last night that resulted in Scott being bitten. They kept talking and joking around, looking for something. Probably for the inhaler in her hand.  
  
She looked at it, then at the direction the two boys’ voices were coming from.  
  
“Maybe the killer moved the body,” said Stiles once she was in view of them. Scott was crouching, searching the ground haphazardly. Looking for something this way would ensure that whatever he was looking for stayed lost.  
  
“If he did it I hope he didn't take my inhaler, this thing costs like eighty bucks…”  
  
Stiles turned around first. “What— Oh, Laura!”  
  
The noise warned Scott, who stood up.  
  
“Hi guys. Are you looking for that, by any chance?” She said, holding the inhaler up.  
  
“Wh— Oh, yeah, thanks Laura!” Scott took his inhaler, checked it, then tucked it into his pocket.  
  
“So, what are you doing here— oh, crap, we’re not on your land, are we?” asked Stiles.  
  
“No, I think this is still the Preserve. Nothing looks more like a tree than another tree, right?” She smiled slightly, then sobered. “You two really shouldn’t be in the woods after the last few days.” She looked at Scott when she said that. He still smelled of wolf, getting sharper and more defined. And he seemed completely oblivious to it.  
  
He brightened, seemingly recalling something. “Guess what? We went to the lacrosse tryouts, and I think we’re both going to be first line!”  
  
She smiled, started walking toward her house to herd them into moving. “That’s great! Make sure you’re not getting overwhelmed, though, with school and lacrosse and work. Taking a break, or a nap, is the best. Trust the nurse, here.”  
  
Both boys laughed.  
  
“The car is this way,” showed Stiles, once one of the trail toward the Hale house was in view. His way was in the opposite direction, toward one of the Preserve entrances— something felt familiar, at this intersection. Laura looked back, frowning slightly.  
  
Scott and Stiles were still talking about school and a new girl and Lydia, Stiles’ long-time crush, but Laura noted that Stiles noticed her looking back. She filed that away. “That’s our cue to part then. Will I see any of you guys soon?”  
  
“Yeah, for sure,” smiled Scott, almost jumping in place with excitement. “You should come to the matches!”  
  
She smiled again, said maybe and they parted ways. She waited until she couldn’t see them anymore, then turned toward the way they had come again.  
  
Oh.  
  
It was one of the most direct ways to get to the Nemeton.  
  
+  
  
Two days later, she was no closer to any leads. Peter was still in Los Angeles, had called her to let her know he’d be back later than he had first expected and there would probably be a couple packages coming from him, could she take care of it?  
  
Wil’s upper body still hadn’t been found that she knew of, and the Sheriff refused apologetically to let her know anything on the basis that she wasn’t family.  
  
Derek had caught pneumonia, and the treatment made his breathing sound worse than usual, his skin paler. She couldn’t wheel him outside from some much needed sunlight, and wouldn’t be able to sneak him out for the full moon.  
  
Melissa had mentioned that Scott was being a teenager, in love, with all that encompassed. Laura couldn’t tell if he was being just a teen, or if the wolf was taking over. She needed to talk to him, and soon, but between her work and Derek, she had her hands full.  
  
She wanted to scream.  
  
Like after every shift, she went to Derek’s room. She was half-way through reading him Equal Rites at the moment, and was thinking of taking a break from the Discworld after that.  
  
There was already someone in the room.  
  
“— and so I told him, and he completely, and utterly, didn’t believe me. Me. We’ve been together every step of the way, and I tell him he’s a werewolf, and he accuses me of wasting his time and ruining his life. I want him to not turn into a killer and shit, and does he listen to me? Noooo. Instead he goes out and tonight’s the full moon.”  
  
“Stiles?” Laura asked, stepping into the room. “Where’s Scott?”  
  
Stiles jumped out of the chair, and whirled around. “Oh my god, how are you— you need a bell!”  
  
“Stiles, enough, where’s Scott?”  
  
The teen was frozen in place. She felt her eyes flare. Stiles gasped. “Who— what—“  
  
“You already know, Stiles.”  
  
“You’re— You’re the one who bit Scott!” He cried accusingly.  
  
“No. If I’m not mistaken, I was sleeping on Melissa’s couch when he was bitten. You went into the woods to find Wil’s body, that night.”  
  
“We— oh my god, the body was Wil’s. I’m sorry, Laura.” He gave a double take. “Wait, that doesn’t explain anything—“  
  
She rolled her eyes. “You came to the right conclusion, Stiles. I’m a werewolf, Scott is one, too, and no, I didn’t bite him. There’s another in town, and whoever they are does not have good intentions.”  
  
Stiles had the look of someone connecting the dots and suddenly seeing the picture. “Wil— they found wolf’s hair on his body.”  
  
Laura came to Derek’s side, passing her hand through his hair. His eyes were closed at the moment, the oxygen mask fogging slightly at regular intervals. She kissed his forehead and took some of his pain— it was hazy, today, distant. She refused to think too much about it, about the implications of it. Derek was a fighter. He’d be back, one day.  
  
“Come on,” she told Stiles, touching his arm above his elbow to make him move, “let’s go rescue Scott and keep talking.”  
  
+  
  
Allison, Scott’s Allison apparently, was an Argent.  
  
_A hunter._  
  
She was a nice girl, polite enough while she was driven back to her house by Scott’s older nurse friend. She didn’t seem to know anything, but Laura knew how well people could hide secrets and knowledge.  
  
A text from Stiles let her know Scott was at his house as Allison closed her house’s door behind her. Laura sighed in relief.  
  
The relief was short-lived however, as the next text arrived:  
  
from: Stiles  
Scott is going to Allison’s house, freaked out when I told him you drove her back!  
What do I do?  
  
to: Stiles  
Stay at his house. I’m taking care of it.  
  
Allison Argent had left her jacket in the car. It smelled of perfume, people, and a little of alcohol. Laura parked on the side of the road, then walked into the woods, eyes brilliantly red, and the jacket in hand.  
  
It took only five minutes for Scott to show up, eyes bright. He whirled around when Laura stepped around the tree she had been waiting behind. In his hands was the jacket.  
  
“What did you do with her?!”  
  
“I took her home,” replied Laura, as the same moment she hear more crackling and stomping through the woods. “Come on, I’ll drive you back.”  
  
“Why should I go anywhere with you?! You’re the one who made me like this!”  
  
“Scott, enough. You’ve known me for years. I may be a werewolf but I’m not the one who turned you. Now move!” She finished, grabbing Scott’s arm as the steps came closer, the red pinpricks of laser sights dancing in the undergrowth.  
  
She set a punishing pace for the car, keeping her grip on Scott. He had stopped fighting her after the first arrow had embedded itself in a tree at face-height.  
  
He was quieter when they finally stopped and sat in the car. Laura didn’t wait around, started the car and drove down toward Scott’s house. She hadn’t seen who it had been— but given Allison, probably Argents. She hoped it was Chris. Out of them all, he was the least of too many evils.  
  
“Who were they?” asked Scott. He was clutching the jacket tight.  
  
Laura glanced at him. Either he had locked on Allison’s scent and there would be no keeping away from her, or she could become his anchor. People as anchor was a stupid idea in Laura’s opinion. It was too moveable.  
  
“Hunters,” she replied. “They come after us. Have been for centuries. Sometimes they’re a necessary evil. Most of the time they shoot first and ask questions later.”  
  
“There is no ‘us’,” he growled.  
  
Laura rolled her eyes. “Scott, you’re a new werewolf. I’ve been one all my life. I can help you control your new instincts, make sense of what happens to you. You know me,” she said, looking at him. “You’ve known me for years, and so have your mom and Stiles. You go read to my brother,” she pleaded. “I want to help you.”  
  
He looked back, steadily, then averted his gaze, looking chastened. He nodded, and didn’t say anything else until they were all back at his house.  
  
“You know what actually worries me the most?” He said, once he had changed into clean clothes. They were all sitting in his room.  
  
“If you say Allison, I'm gonna punch you in the head,” said Stiles, looking at the ceiling.  
  
“She probably hates me now,” Scott said, seemingly oblivious to Stiles’ answer. Laura didn’t miss Stiles’ expression. She had the urge to make a face too.  
  
“I doubt that. But you better come up with a pretty amazing apology. Or you know you could just... Tell her the truth and come to terms with the fact that you're a freaking werewolf.”  The glare Scott sent him could have peeled the paint off a wall. “Okay, bad idea... Hey, we'll get through this,” he said, encompassing Laura in this statement by looking at her then back at Scott.  
  
“Well. If you two are quite done, let’s start on that,” she said. “And the first thing you have to know about being a werewolf, is that control over ourselves is everything.”  
  
They had a weekend to start on helping Scott. They would make the best of it, avoiding the woods and keeping to the large furnished basement at her house. It would give her the opportunity to see the two boys interacting with each other, their dynamics. They were a team already, a little pack of their own. It would make explaining pack hierarchy and joining easier— but the offer to join hers, her struggling pack of only three now, would wait until Scott was more comfortable in his skin.  
  
At the moment, quite curiously, Stiles was the one who was the most comfortable with, as he said, “the werewolf thing.”  
  
Interacting with the boys outside of the usual environments she saw them in, and them her —the hospital, the high school sometimes, various Beacon Hills shops and Melissa’s house— highlighted how much she didn’t know. She had invited them over Saturday morning for breakfast over their protests, which were quickly quashed once she told me she would be feeding them.  
  
They entered the house with wandering gazes, clearly uncomfortable. That was alright. The house made her uncomfortable too.  
  
“Come on to the kitchen, it’s cozier.”  
  
She had a pot of coffee, orange juice and ready-to-pour pancakes set out— cooking was not her focus. Most days, when she came back home, she had just enough energy to eat the first thing in her sights in the fridge before going up to her room.  
  
Stiles excused himself away from the table, asking for the bathroom. He didn’t exactly follow her directions however— she could hear him explore. That was alright, too, she could hear exactly where he was. There wasn’t much she had to hide, and nothing he’d see now.  
  
“I’m sorry it happened to you this way,” she said, over her coffee cup.  
  
Scott’s head jerked up. “What?”  
  
“The bite. We usually consider it a gift, to give it. At least my family did. Heightened senses, better metabolism, a cure for most afflictions— as well as bringing in people into our packs and families. The bite transforms the one bitten, but it also transforms the one who bites. Usually, at least.” She took a sip. Scott seemed conflicted. “How’s your asthma?” she asked.  
  
“It’s— I think it’s gone.”  
  
Upstairs, she heard Stiles creaking open the door to the room she had set up as Derek’s, when he’d be back. She closed her eyes briefly, so as not to scare Scott with their flaring.  
  
“You said pack,” he said, and the way he looked at the ceiling and moved on the chair made it clear he knew where Stiles was and he was embarrassed by it.  
  
“I did. A pack consists of werewolves and others who agree to stay in this unit under the authority of one person. How rigid the authority is depends on the packs. You can be born into one, join one, or be bitten by the one person in charge. But for that they need to be uncommon. We call people with the ability to transform others alpha.”  
  
Stiles had came down during her little expose, in time to ask questions. “You’re one, aren’t you?” he said.  
  
She saw Scott stiffen. “I am,” she agreed, nodding slightly. “My mother was my alpha, and her mother hers before her. Until this week, I thought I was the only alpha in town.”  
  
“You’re the one who made me like this!” exploded Scott suddenly, claws out and eyes flaring. Stiles took a step back, then a step forward, a “come on man, we’ve been through this already—“ that Scott didn’t listen to.  
  
Laura stared Scott down. “Scott. I did not bite you. I want to help you control your new abilities.” She pushed, for a little bit of suggestion, but not too much. She was not his pack leader, and she would not take this choice from him. “Please, Scott. Just breathe for a minute. Can you hear the fridge humming? What about the birds, outside?”  
  
The distraction through his senses didn’t work, and he jumped at her, Stiles not able to grab him. Laura took Scott’s hands in hers, and held him at arms’ length, her chair falling to the floor in a clatter.  
  
“Scott! You need to anchor yourself! There’s at least an idea, a concept, a place, a memory— you hold onto it and you can control yourself instead of being lost to your instincts and your senses.” He growled, fangs growing and face changing. Well, at least now she knew he could change. “You anchor yourself to protect yourself, but you control yourself to protect others.” Tired of the fight and finger grabs, she crossed her arms, moving his, until he was held tight against her, back to her chest. She turned him away until they were both facing Stiles, who had retreated to the door of the room.  
  
“Look at him, Scott— would you hurt Stiles?” He roared. So much for that. “He’s your best friend, your brother. He’s your pack mate. You have each other’s back. You protect him, and he protects you.” She kept repeating this until she could feel his heartbeat going back to normal.  
  
“Are you okay?” she finally asked.  
  
Scott kept his gaze on the floor.  
  
“I’m sorry I grabbed you like this. Are you going to be okay if I let you go now?”  
  
He nodded.  
  
“Is that going to happen all the time? What about lacrosse? I can’t not play lacrosse!” His heart was starting to speed up again.  
  
“Hey buddy, I think you gotta calm down,” said Stiles, coming closer.  
  
Laura took a step back, giving Scott more space. “Stiles has the right idea. A racing heart doesn’t help. You need to find your anchor, something that keeps you into your humanity.”  
  
“What’s yours?” asked Stiles.  
  
Laura grimaced. “Not very polite to ask.” Both boys were staring at her. She sighed. “It’s duty.”  
  
“Duty?” Asked Scott.  
  
“I have— responsibilities. People to care for.”  
  
“Derek,” breathed Stiles.  
  
“Yes,” she said. “My job, too. I keep in control by reminding myself that I have a place in how things work, that people rely on me.”  
  
“It doesn’t sound very calming,” said Stiles. He was the first one back at the table, spearing a cold pancake onto his plate. Those moves, out of everything, seemed to calm Scott the most. Something normal, and innocuous. Interesting.  
  
“It’s stable and work for me,” she said, righting her chair. “The pack leader you follow could also help you, or force you, into changing.”  
  
Scott wrinkled his nose. “Is that what you did to me?”  
  
She shook her head. “No. I’m an alpha, but I’m not yours. It’s a decision you have to make yourself. But there’s much more you have to know to be able to do that.”  
  
The day continued much in the same manner, both boys complimenting each other, Scott losing control, Laura carefully edging around his limits, encouraging him to shift and find an anchor. She sent them running around the edges of her land, turned it into a game of tag— and still Scott went touch and go with his new abilities.  
  
“Is there a cure?” he asked, on Sunday.  
  
“No,” she answered. “Don’t get Stiles to look for any either. Everything he’ll find are legends and stories hunters told.” She tried to hold his gaze and make him understand how important that was: “The only cure they believe in is death.”  
  
She wasn’t sure she was successful in teaching him as much as she could in how little time she had.  
  
They parted with several “be careful”-s.  
  
At night, she ran the borders of Beacon Hills, hunting for a scent that didn’t belong. There was nothing all weekend. Wil’s other half still hadn’t been found. She still didn’t know anything. Derek didn’t comment on her tears, Monday morning before her shift. He kept breathing in medicine, but he kept breathing.  
  
from: Scott  
Allison’s dad was the hunter that was in the woods!  
  
from: Stiles  
Scott lost control during lacrosse training. Hurt another player.  
  
“Hey, Melissa? I think I’m going to use those saved-up leave days.”  
  
+  
  
The police installed a curfew that day. There had been another body found during the night, still in the Preserve but right next to the road this time.  
  
“Can you believe he’s never seen _The Wolfman_?” exclaimed Stiles.  
  
Scott rolled his eyes behind him. Stiles whirled around.  
  
“Come on, Lon Chaney Jr? Claude Rains? The original classic werewolf movie?”  
  
“No, what’s the point?”  
  
“You're so unprepared for this.”  
  
“It’s at best a bad movie, at worse exploitative,” said Laura to end the one-sided argument. “I prefer _Alien_.” Stiles looked appreciative, Scott slightly disgusted. “What are you guys doing here?”  
  
“We heard… that there was another body,” said Scott.  
  
They were all three by Laura’s house, looking at the police cordoning an area of woods that was less dense than the surroundings. Laura’s hands, in her pockets, were curled into claws.  
  
“So we followed my dad after school,” finished Stiles. “That’s not the last one, isn’t it?”  
  
“No,” she said, and closed her eyes when the deputies and forensics raised a body out of the hole and removed it on a covered stretcher. Not a body, one half of a body.  
  
“Ms. Hale,” called a voice. When she opened her eyes, the Sheriff was in front of her, staring down his son and Scott. “What are you two doing here?”  
  
“Dad, rude much? Don’t make Laura rethink being friend with us!”  
  
“We heard, about Wil,” said Scott, with the most convincing innocent and puppyish face. “We just wanted… to help.” Most of it was probably true, too.  
  
The Sheriff sighed. “Okay. Ms. Hale—“  
  
“Laura, please. Just Laura.” She tore her eyes away from the retreating form of the stretcher and the ambulance it had went in.  
  
“I’m going to need your statement. Can you come to the station with us?”  
  
“Is it okay if it happens here? My uncle is due to arrive in a couple hours, and I don’t want him to arrive to an empty house and this,” she said gesturing to the hole and police tape and people.  
  
“Yes, of course.” He pointed to the boys, “You two, get the hell out of here.”  
  
“If— you’re not too busy,” she called them back, “if you have the time, could you go keep company to Derek?”  
  
“I’ve got to go to work,” said Scott, “I’m sorry.”  
  
“I can go,” said Stiles almost exactly at the same time.  
  
“Thanks. And Scott, can you tell Alan I’d like to talk to him soon?”  
  
Scott nodded, clearly wondering what that was about— Stiles had the same look. They both left in Stiles’ Jeep, and the Sheriff waited to talk to her until they were gone.  
  
“Is it okay if we go inside?”  
  
“Sure,” the Sheriff said, following her.  
  
She led him to the kitchen. “Can I get you anything?” The question was perfunctory, keeping busy with pouring herself coffee, having something to do with her hands.  
  
“I’m good, thanks,” he said. “How’s Derek?” and she smiled, for him making conversation, for not going straight for the questions that were waiting.  
  
“The same. Battling pneumonia. He had a bout last year, it’s probably going to be a reoccurring problem,” she smiled tightly. “Scott and Stiles have been great with helping me keep him company.”  
  
She was glad he didn’t follow up with “sorry”-s and get betters. “I won’t take much of your time then. Can you tell me what happened that you came across—“ He trailed off.  
  
“It’s Wil, isn’t it.” She looked through the window. She couldn’t see the site from there. “I left work around 11am.”  
  
“Is that when your shift ends?”  
  
“No, it ends at 10.15, but I went to see Derek. I drove straight here from there. I decided to take a walk before Peter was due back, and then.”  
  
“It’s okay, take your time.”  
  
“That part of the woods has a lot of clearings, I think there were cabins there at a time and there are trails through it. I don’t usually walk there, but today i did— and there was freshly turned earth in one of them. It’s still my family’s land, there shouldn’t be any reason for people to do stuff there. The trails are open, but that’s it. So I dug a little, and there was an arm. I called the police, and there we are.”  
  
“Thank you. Did Wil ever talk to you about his family, or friends, or work acquaintances?”  
  
She shook her head. “No. We weren’t that close yet. I don’t think he liked talking about why he was in Beacon Hills.” But she knew, a story she had heard a hundred times growing up, somewhat safe in the knowledge that it would never happen to her because she had a family-pack and an alpha respected all across the West Coast. Hunters going through, decimating a pack until there were only stragglers destroyed by infighting, rogue alphas going mad on the full moon and biting their way through, sending scared new werewolves into a world they knew nothing about.  
  
“I called the hospital— they say you’ve asked for time off.”  
  
“Yes. I wanted some time to breathe. And to stay with Derek.”  
  
“Thank you, Laura. I’ll let you know if I need any follow-up.”  
  
There was the sound of a car coming up the driveway, still a long way away. It sounded like Peter’s car.  
  
“One last thing,” said the Sheriff, on the front porch. “Two, actually. Where was Peter?”  
  
“Los Angeles, as far as I know.” It _is_ all she knows. He could have been in Portland or San Francisco or anywhere. The lack of close ties or open communication with what was essentially her only functioning beta was another problem to think about and resolve.  
  
His packages had never arrived.  
  
The Sheriff nodded. “And— it might be completely unrelated, and I’m aware that this is reaching far.” He turned to face her. “I’m reopening the case of your family’s death and Derek’s consequent injuries.”  
  
She crossed her arms over her chest. She still hadn’t taken off the light jacket she had layered on to go outside, had tracked dirt all over the floor. “It was ruled an electrical fire, an accident.”  
  
“I think we both know something else was going on.”  
  
She clenched her fists. Of course something else had went on. An accidental electrical fire didn’t shoot bullets and leave her brother in a coma. An accidental electrical fire didn’t take out a family of werewolves. An accidental electrical fire didn’t smell like wolfsbane and gasoline. She closed her eyes. “It won’t bring anyone back.”  
  
The Sheriff didn’t say more, and left.  
  
Peter entered, smile neatly framed by his goatee, and as unconvincing as ever, spreading his hands wide. She could see the burn scar on his right hand. “Dearest niece, it’s a joy to see you. Los Angeles is a den of uncultured pigs.”  
  
+  
  
“So, we have kind of a problem.”  
  
“If I don't play, I lose first line and Allison.”  
  
It took the boys barely a heartbeat from looking at her to look at each other and continue what was clearly a running argument.  
  
“Allison won't go away! And it's just one game, that you really don't need to play!”  
  
“I want to play! I want to be on the team, I want to go out with Allison. I want to live my freaking normal life. Do you get that?”  
  
“I get that... —“  
  
“I’d like to know what’s going on, first,” Laura said, interrupting her argument. She sat down on the one chair in the back room of Deaton’s Animal Clinic, leaning her head on her fist. She had spent the night with Derek once she had given Peter the broad strokes of what was going on in Beacon Hills, then she had ran through most of the preserve, trying to get a bead on the invading alpha’s scent. There had been nothing. There hadn’t been any hunters out either.  
  
“He got what—“  
  
“Scott went berserk on Jackson at practice—“  
  
“—he deserved!”  
  
“—so now we’re down our captain for the opening game on Saturday. And Coach is basically forcing Scott to play. Which is the worst idea because  <em>Scott</em>,” Stiles said pointedly, looking at his friend, “looses control when he’s worried. Or angry. Or stressed.” A pause. “To be honest, there’s a lot to be stressed about, so there’s that.”  
  
“Why are we here, anyway?” asked Scott, fiddling with a cleaning rag.  
  
The place smelled like Scott. Like his territory. She really needed to talk to him about pack and alliances and what being an omega meant. Or maybe Deaton would do it. It fell under his duties as Emissary— if he still was Emissary like he had been for her mother. In the last six years, there hadn’t been much reasons to seek his advice. The Hales had kept to themselves, and Deaton to himself.  
  
“I have things to ask Deaton.”  
  


* * *

  
  
[season 1 goes more or less as canon, Kate still kidnaps Derek and keeps him in the basement of the house to lure the other werewolves in, and Peter is revealed to be an alpha (he killed one in South California) to gather enough power to take over Laura’s lead]  
  
 

* * *

  
  
  
She let Peter’s blood drip from her hand for only a second before she whirled around and rushed to her brother. He was where the hunters then Peter had left him, crumpled on himself, blood on his face and hands and chest. Stiles’ jacket wasn’t long enough to cover him properly, wasn’t thick enough to stop the blood or the coolness of the night.  
  
She cradled him carefully in her arms, tugging the jacket closed around him. His eyes were closed and his breathing shallow, unresponsive as he had been for the past six years.  
  
His heart was slowing down, one missed beat at the time.  
  
“No,” she whispered.  
  
If anything was happening around them, she stayed blind and deaf to it.  
  
She gathered him more fully in her arms, trying to transfer her body warmth to him, to will his body to heal the latest wound. She bent her head until his face was against her neck and the only thing she could smell and hear was her brother’s life slipping away.  
  
Laura rocked Derek, refusing to raise her head, refusing to open her eyes. Her hand was splayed on his chest, covered in blood, trying to keep it in, trying to take his pain, all of it, there had to be some, he couldn’t be dead, he was alive he was alive—  
  
“No Derek, please, fight, fight, don’t leave, Derek, Derek,” she sobbed, the litany breaking into sobs and inarticulate cries.  
  
She felt her heart spasm in her chest, protesting the strain of taking so much pain so fast, but she kept going, folding herself over his body, so close, closer, taking everything she could. It hurt so much.  
  
She screamed, the sound muffled by his body.  
  
Silence only echoed.  
  
She choked on a sob.  
  
“No no no no nooononononooooo—“  
  
And then, impossibly, under her ear, a heartbeat. She stopped breathing, pressed her head to his chest.  
  
There was another. Another. Another. Strong, and regular, and Derek’s.  
  
“L’ra…” She heard her name slurred.  
  
She raised her head, opened her eyes. In the half-light of the night and the car’s headlight, she could see Derek’s features. His eyes were half open, glinting a blue that was turning to purple, turning to alpha-red. His eyes were half open and looking at her.  
  
“Lau’a…” He repeated, an arm twitching.  
  
She smiled, holding back a sob, and very carefully put her bloodied hand on his forehead, then through his hair. He felt warm. He was shivering a little in the night air. And still she could hear his heartbeat.  
  
“I’m here. I’m right here.”  
  
She kept crying in relief, and didn’t care about what happened around her.  
  
Derek was heralded as a medical miracle, regaining awareness and responsiveness far faster than any case known. Laura quickly quelled the doctors’ enthusiasm, back at Beacon Hills Memorial. Derek was alive, conscious, not comatose anymore. He was rebuilding muscle quickly now that he could move on his own, but he still was a long way away from being okay.  
  
That was even without talking about his state of mind at finding himself having bypassed the latter part of puberty, having aged six years in a body still growing. He hadn’t recognized himself in the mirror the first few days. He also didn’t talk about the fire or their family, but Laura didn’t either. He had had troubles to talk, to swallow, to remember, at first, convinced it was 2005 and asking for their mother. He made progress, stopped asking her questions.  
  
That was without talking about him being an alpha too, and the surge of power that had allowed him to finally heal.  
  
She was worried about his silence.  
  
All in due time, she thought. She was Alpha of the territory with a pack that consisted of another alpha, she needed to figure out the extent of Peter’s machinations, to keep her guardian duties, to reign the wayward new wolves and associated in Beacon Hills.  
  
Chris came to see her a couple days after the showdown, bearing a warning. Of more hunters, of his father coming, of more fights to come. Laura sat at the table of her too big kitchen in her showroom house and breathed in the morning light, yearning for peace.  
  
All in due time.


	3. The Space AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Space AU of season 1, where supernaturals are called Augments, and humanity left for the stars a long time ago, and hunters are still around too.
> 
> Canon-typical violence, alternate universe - space

Whoever said space was silent was a joker.  
  
Try getting in a space suit, see how silent things were. Everything made noise, from the air systems to the hydraulics to how you could take a piss. Not that Stiles would know all of that in real circumstances, out there on the hull for example. He had been barred from ever taking the psych exam to be allowed to don a suit and join Scott and the others on the hull— and that wasn't even the doing of his father, who was the Sheriff, Chief of Security on BEACON-hill and understandably careful. No, that was all Stiles' doing, Stiles and Stiles' brain and having had several serious panic attacks rotation-years ago. That was why he was pondering the silence of space while reading on ancient mythology —oh, earth mythology, what was not wrong with you— and trying to stay awake by fidgeting. Listening to the outside team was an absolute bore, and someone had to do it, and apparently that someone was him this rotation. He wasn't even an active supervisor, didn't even have to be there with the security supervision they already had but hey, it was an important enough affectation that it could replace being on an outside team.  
  
The red dots indicating the individuals outside blinked lazily on their planned trajectories, and Stiles snorted at a yell—Finstock, again, against Greenberg, putting his tally to ten this rotation on his tablet— and went back to his ebook, half-listening to the chatter of instructions and feedback that came from using the repair tools. Greco-roman myths, man.That shit was fucked up. He threw his head back, to look at the metal-grey ceiling. The ceiling did not do anything in return. If he was lucky, he'd have the time to run to the helm before the navigator class ended. Danny and Lydia barely gave him the time of rotation, but they had nothing against him looking at them playing with holos of trajectories, maps, time-space distortions. One rotation, he knew it, those two would change the face of mathematics and navigation. One rotation, they'd leave BEACON-hill for good, sailing for bigger, better things.    
  
There was a louder yell, then —one Stiles raised his head for, recognizing Scott's voice. His red indicator had moved far from the others, too far. He felt his heart race, and sweat pearl at his collar— then Scott's voice again, calling an all clear.  
  
Stiles glanced back, checking that their supervisor wasn't staring or anything closely related to his job. "Scott? Everything ok, dude?"  
  
The line was public. It was made obvious by Scott's reply— he wasn't a good liar. Not to Stiles. "Fine, I just tripped. There's a… thing. Incident recorded and all. 'S fine."  
  
Stiles clicked a "received", got off the line, heard the jeers and thinly-veiled insults from the rest of the team.  
  
When they were let out, once the hull team was properly de-suited, showered and yelled at as was Finstock's usual, the first thing Stiles did was to pounce on Scott and drag him away, deeper in to the corridors of BEACON-hill.  
  
BEACON was a Hill-class ship, centered around a Garden that was their main source of oxygen, food, and their cemetery. The Garden took over empty space a little more every year, as people died or left toward newer ships, of newer, better classes —never planet-side, ever, they weren't good enough, trained enough, body- and mental-steady enough from generations of ship-dwellers to be allowed to the elite planet-exploration teams and other dirt-side colonies. Soon, and by soon understand several rotation-years, enough of them that Stiles and his average life-span of eighty rotation-years would not see it, BEACON-hill would probably become only a large food and oxygen production unit with a minimal crew, relegated to Farm-class like many before it.  
  
For now, BEACON-hill was not as big as a Town-class, and nowhere near the City-class and Cruisers, but it was big enough to not know everyone on sight and to be able to find a secluded place with little security. Stiles knew almost all the ship by heart. Almost, because there were places he hadn't been able to get into yet, the ones where the security and surveillance was a little too tight, the ones he hoped becoming an engineer like his mother would give him access to— in his heart, he still wished for hidden treasures and pirate stashes like in his ebooks' stories.  
  
He dragged Scott to their spot, the in-between floor trap door Scott had fell into when they first met, many, many rotations ago. If Stiles' father, being the Sheriff and in charge of all security on BEACON-hill, had never said anything about it, it was probably safe to be there. If Scott's mother had never found out and subconsequently grounded them both until their graduation for using it, then it was absolutely safe to be there.  
  
It was almost fully dark in a way very little places on BEACON-hill were able to be, there. There was only the soft glow of maintenance lights and the few and far between performance indicators. One could imagine they were stars. Scott looked a little paler than his usual, there. Stiles just looked blue.  
  
They faced each other in silence for a bit, before Stiles' fidgeting came back, before Scott started looking at the trap door they had came in.  
  
"So, what happened out there? I never heard you scream like that, save for that one—"  
  
"—time we don't talk about, Stiles, the not talking about it part is the important part, remember?" Scott frowned at him, then sat down, looked at the floor. He would have been up in Stiles' face, any other day. They would have been right up next to each other, shoulders touching. Scott wrapped his hands around his ankles, fingers played nervously with the velcro on the sides of his boots. Stiles crouched, his tablet between his knees.  
  
"There was someone, outside."  
  
"Someone? Not-in-the-class someone?" Stiles tried to remember if the controls had shown someone else than them on the hull— it happened, sometimes, for repairs that weren't minor enough to be handled by the class or alarm-sounding-major but just that weird in-between. There were people just taking a stroll, sometimes, too, bypassing security and authorization and with names not even the Sheriff could touch. There were Border patrols, sometimes. Rarely. Classes were cancelled when those happened.  
  
Scott shook his head, brushed his hair away from his face. "There was someone, _outside_." He stared at Stiles, right into his eyes, like staring could make him share what he had seen to the other boy. "And I'm not sure it was human."

  
  
+++

  
  
There had been a fire. A fire, inside. The automated systems and coolant tracks had malfunctioned due to the initial extreme heat of the ignition point. Over 30 persons had died— burned, asphyxiated, trampled in the panic that had erupted as fast as the flames, when sections of the ship were sealed off and the oxygen cut to stop the fire from spreading.  
  
The smell had lingered for years in the air, thick with burned plastic and grease and flesh.  
  
There was a reason fire was a nightmare in a closed system. It had spread. Fast, too fast, it had threatened the hull integrity from the inside and they had almost lost half of the Garden. Sobering thought. Losing the Garden would have forced an immediate evacuation to the nearest ship, until the plants could be grown again, until enough oxygen to support human life was flowing again, if BEACON-hill was even intact enough to allow healing and growth.  
  
They had stories, of losing the first ships straight from Earth like that. It was never epic stories of heroes. It was tales of losing homes, again and again, of conflicts between survivors, ultimately, of the black that dominated their lives, outside.  
  
It still smelled like ashes, sometimes, and it made hearts beat faster, it made eyes dart for the doors and emergency systems.  
  
Too many had died.

  
  
+++

  
  
Derek stayed flat on his face with his hands tied behind his back for six hours.  
  
The first hour, every move he made, every noise, every twitch, was met with a boot, a gun butt, an insult. The electrical baton, only once. "Too messy," the guy in charge had called it. Too messy and they had used them extensively for his capture, even if he had not struggled, even if he had just stood there with his hands up. Derek had every right to be there. He was still a resident of the Hill-class ship BEACON. He should not have been taken down the minute he had stepped in the shuttle port by the Border patrols. He should not have been detained without charges, nor as he suspected, without the proper authorities of BEACON-hill having been notified. The patrol who had jumped him— Derek shouldn't have pinged on their radar, with his hair longer, with his rough gear, with the patches and chips that declared him part of exploration teams and clean up crews. He was nothing, nobody, anonymous, not even the kind of ExploCorp that dragged the eyes and got the honors.  
  
Unless they knew _what_ he was. Unless this patrol was Chris Argent's. Unless it was Kate's— and there would be no worries about why and how for long, in that case: he was already dead. There would be no point in struggling. Not anymore.  
  
The thought was easier to contemplate than he would have thought. The tense muscles in his neck went liquid fiber by fiber, as the realization that he had no exit set in. There was nothing to fight here and now.  
  
He could feel the vibration of the engines humming in the metal floor, vibrating through his bones, shaking his brain from the inside. He could see where the patrol had strewn the content of his bag on the floor. There had been nothing important in there. The only important thing was the canister of ashes no larger than his palm that was digging into his sternum, the one the patrol hadn't cared about. He could see his thick twisted locks of hair moving ever so slightly, mind wandering to Ronon and the man's insistence on playing with Derek's hair until they could be mistaken for each other from the back. It had helped distance himself from who he had been on BEACON-hill. It had helped Derek become someone else, move on, grow up. It had brought a rare smile to Laura's lips.  
  
He dozed, after a while, no distraction but for the mind-numbing hum and the back and forth of the patrol's boots. There wasn't a speck of dust on those. They looked like their owners, off-colored from having never been under a planet-side sun.  
  
  
+++  
  
  
He waited seven rotations after Laura's death, expecting and dreading to see red eyes look back at him in the mirror of the bathroom, expecting and dreading the increase in power, in knowledge, in control. Laura had made it look easy. He was afraid of it. After those seven rotations, Jennifer unlocked the door of his quarters, dropped a couple of chips on his bed.  
  
"Round trip to BEACON-hill, as per her wishes. The chips will mark you as an ExploCorp slash cleaner. Enough references to cover the last six years."  
  
He looked at the chips, at the canister of ashes he hadn't touched since he brought it in.  
  
"Still got mine on record?" His voice sounded weird to himself. He hadn't talked in seven rotations. Laura had been dead for a hundred and seventy-five hours, five minutes, seventeen seconds, universal time.  
  
"Your wishes?" He nodded, as she was waiting for his answer. "If it's still 'leave you where you die, and destroy the body,' then yes."  
  
She was an Augment too, but unlike him and Laura, she had no name for herself. Or maybe she did. She didn't like to talk or be questioned about it. He understood. You didn't go to the Corps to chat about yourself.  
  
  
  
  



	4. AU in an AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A kinda monster in three parts: the 'real' world (an alternate version of season 3a where canon 3a is a nightmare world), an alternate universe, and the 'real' world again.
> 
> panic attacks, suicidal thoughts (in the past), alternate universe, illness, alive hale family (in the alternate universe), pack, pack family, curse, darach, alpha pack.

[first part]

It’s Derek’s turn.  
          
It’s Derek’s turn, _again_. They have all fallen to the curse, to the nightmare, to whatever the technical term is, in turns, but it seems to target Derek more— it’s the fourth time now. The first time it happened, for him, he wrapped the Camaro around a tree going up to the Hale house. He would have stayed there in the two days it took him to wake up if Isaac and Scott hadn’t found him.  
          
It’s Derek’s turn and he’s twisting and crying in Melissa’s arms and repeating “Sorry, I’m sorry” and calling “Mom, Mom” between sobs. The latter is what makes Scott gets up and leaves the room. He and Boyd— they were afraid Derek would forget how strong he is in his nightmare, and that they would need to hold him down. It happened before, to Isaac, to Scott, with vivid bruises for results. But at this point, Melissa’s arms around Derek are all that are needed to keep him from trying to trash around.  
          
Scott stays on the landing for a couple minutes. He can still hear his mother talking to Derek, trying to get to him; it had worked with Lydia and she had woken up screaming so loud every member of the pack had heard her, even the ones on the other side of town. He can still hear his mother’s words, his mother’s tears. He wipes his face on his shirt. He takes a breath. Then only he goes down into the living room.  
          
The rest of the pack is waiting there, Isaac looking at the ceiling, Erica and Stiles just staring in the distance. It's been a long day. A long week. A long month. None of them do well with waiting: waiting for who will be the next one taken under, waiting for the one taken under to wake up. Scott hugs Stiles where he is curled on the couch, stays there in the circle of arms of his best friend, his brother. Stiles hugs him back, right hand clasped round his phone, makes space next to him to create a tangle of limbs. The TV is on mute, blurred colors no one is paying attention to.  
          
A bit after that, Boyd comes down, and what is happening to him, to Derek, to all of them, is taking his toll on him. It's on his face, in the tight lines around his mouth, in the shadows of his eyes counting new nightmares. He sits down on the floor and curls into Erica's side and her arms, his back to Scott and Stiles and Isaac’s legs, their pressure an added anchor into here and there and pack.  

The exhausted silence lasts... too long.

  It's Isaac who breaks the quiet. “He's asleep."   

Melissa's footsteps can be heard shortly after, coming down the stairs slowly. They look away when she wipes her eyes. "Food, anyone?"  

They say yes, because there's not much else to do, but they stay in the kitchen, cramped and in view of each other. Melissa sits down, and Scott and Stiles are the ones taking charge of finding food in the fridge, never too far from each other.  
          
        +  

Once there's food though, they stare at it. Erica pokes at her sandwich. "I'll— I'm going up," she says, slides her plate to Isaac, and she goes up, and that's the only move in the kitchen for the next ten minutes that she can hear.

  She goes up the stairs, paying attention to the creaky fourth step, to the rug that catches feet in front of the bathroom door.  

Derek's in the guest room, where he was the last time she went up, where he has been for the past day. His face is turned toward the open doorway, and there's moonlight and the light from the street falling on him from the window. It's just enough to see the black and blue skin around his eyes, the thick black stitches in the deep gashes starting where his collar gapes, the tattered skin of the back of his hands. He had fought something. He had tried to tell them about it.  And then the nightmare had taken him, leaving him unconscious and unaware of his surroundings. Lydia and Allison and the others had taken over the hunt for his attacker, their first lead into a resolution to this nightmare. Or their first lead into more troubles on the way.  

Erica goes in, quietly, as quietly as she can. It's the first time he's been... at peace, or looking like it, since he fell under this time. She can't take that away from him.  
  
She’d still prefer for him to wake up.  

There's a murmur of voices, downstairs, now. She hopes for good news, for Deaton's call, for the Sheriff’s, and Lydia’s, and Jackson’s, and Allison’s, and Chris Argent’s, for them to say it's over, they found the source, they put an end to it, they can breathe, there won't be more threats of being pulled under into a twisted nightmare of a reality and waking up to something that feels wrong and starting to forget which side is real and never knowing who would be next and—  
          
She can deal with it. In that twisted mirrorverse, she is dead now. That’s it. There is nothing to do, nothing to see, she is just dead and nothingness and when she wakes up her heart hurts in her chest. 

 She sits on the edge of the bed, place her hand mid-way between her and Derek. He doesn't move, keeps breathing low and slow. She curls up, tucks her feet under her body, her head below his chin. She doesn't touch him, not that close, but close enough to feel the heat of him, his breath, the salty tang of tears.  
          
They are all terrified. Terrified to realize that maybe the other side is real, that maybe this is the dream, and there is no pack, no strength, no friendship. Terrified to have no idea who or what is doing this, for what reasons. Terrified that someday whoever is under will stay under, and wither away.  Those had been Stiles’s words, when he woke up from his second nightmare, and that was all he said. That is all he ever said about the nightmares, about being pulled under. She knows Boyd saw Stiles, in the nightmares, and so did Scott, but they don’t know if the nightmares are related. They could be. No-one is talking much about it, no one dares. There is too much power in words.  
          
All she sees is nothingness, and she almost wishes she could give it to the others, who dream about torture and isolation and fighting to stay afloat.  
          
She wants to know who or what’s responsible and tear their throats out for messing with them, for messing with what’s theirs, what’s hers. She’ll kill them for making them all afraid to sleep. She’ll kill them for making her friends and her have to be under surveillance all the time in case one of them just drops and hurt themselves, or others. She’ll kill them for the torture they are put through again and again.  
          
In the pale light, closer, she can see darker patches on the shirt Derek is wearing, she can smell iron mixed with salt in the air. They hadn't realized how much Derek relied on being alpha, on the healing— how much he threw himself first, into the line of fire, into fights, into life, all to better hide how scared he was to loose it all. It’s all out in the open now, though, and like his wounds, it keeps bleeding. It’s hard to resent him for throwing them into a world they should have had more explanations for, like she did when she turned her back and walked out of Beacon Hills with Boyd’s hand in hers, now that they know how young and lonely Derek was and still is, in a way none of them really are anymore.  
          
Scott and Stiles found Boyd and her asleep in the Preserve.

Asleep or something else— they don’t remember anything, if they met people after they walked out of Argent’s house, if they knew where they were going, if they really stayed there asleep and hidden for a week.  
          
Maybe… maybe it had been the first time any of them fell prey to the nightmare.  
          
Maybe… maybe they should talk about it, about what they saw during the nightmare, about what they knew then and know now. All of them. Someone needs to get the ball rolling, and Erica discovered she’s good at putting things in motion. It’s time to act.  
          
        +  
          
In the kitchen, all sounds seems hushed. Melissa is the first one to move, eating the food Scott put in front of her, finishing it in a few quick bites.  
          
“It’s late, boys. I have to work in the morning.” She gets up, leaves the plate in the sink. Scott hears her take a breath before she turns back to the room, to them. He sees her eyes move on them, the way she did when he and Stiles were younger and coming back from an afternoon of running around, checking for bruises and scratches, checking that they were there, the way she did when werewolves were added to the situation, then IsaacAllisonBoydEricaLydiaJacksonDerek in a tangled mess of people to keep an eye on, to offer a hand on the shoulder or a slap on the back of the head. When Scott looks around the kitchen, he sees three teenagers wearing the expression he feels on his face, tight and dry, ready to crack.  
          
His mother’s arms around his shoulder surprise him, and it takes him a second to raise a hand to cover hers.  
          
“You need anything, do not hesitate to wake me up. Try to sleep, you hear me?” She says, and the last part is as much for Scott as for the others. She has had werewolves around long enough to know that Erica will have heard her, even from upstairs where she will stay until the sun rises. Scott nods.  
          
Melissa has a pat and a squeezed shoulder for each of them— and they all lean into the touch. 

It’s very silent in the kitchen after she leaves. Stiles turns the phone in his hands over and over and over again. It hasn’t buzzed once from a text or a call all day. None of their phones have. Scott wants to put his hands on Stiles’, he want to reassure him. And he knows that it won't work. The only thing that will work is Stiles hearing from his father’s mouth that he is alright, that everything is alright. Scott wants to hear the Sheriff saying everything is alright, too. He’d believe him to have taken care of the monsters.  
          
Scott gets up. Their food goes into the fridge, wrapped up. With his mother asleep, with Derek out of commission, it falls to him to take care of the three boys still in the kitchen. He accepted this responsibility what seems to be a long time ago, before Boyd was even a werewolf. Before even that, for Stiles, for they took care of each other from the day they met.  
          
He walks to the doorway and look at them. “Let’s go to bed,” he says. “We can all fit in my room,” he continues. _I want to know you are there_ , he doesn’t finish, but they seem to get it.  
          
The click of the kitchen’s light switch under Boyd’s finger sounds a little too loud, a little too final. They check all the windows and doors downstairs. They check all the open doors, upstairs. Erica opens one eye for them, doesn’t return their nods, turns back to face Derek’s immobile body.  
          
There isn’t quite enough space for them to all fit on Scott’s double bed. They still pile up there. Stiles and Scott tangle around each other in a way they haven’t been in years. Isaac curls on himself against Scott’s back, Boyd bracing them all from falling over the side of the bed, his eyes open. It’ll be Scott’s turn to watch, after him, then Isaac, then Erica in the other room. Stiles had insisted to have a shift, too, in the beginning, saying he’d be awake anyway, Adderal and anxiety keeping him up. That night had been the first he went under, his heart racing and his breath too short for hours. Melissa had wanted him in the hospital, and monitored. The Sheriff had pushed for it, too. Scott and Derek, and surprisingly, Lydia and Chris Argent, had convinced them to wait it out, like they had done for the others. Deaton stayed at Stiles' side, a sort of compromise.  
          
Alan Deaton isn’t saying everything he knows about what is going on, but what else is new. Scott trusts him, regardless, half-mentor, half-father figure, the sheriff being the other half.  
          
There is now one pack and pack-adjacent people and they are all in the same mess.  
          
Scott watches the lights of a passing car reflected in Boyd’s eyes, shifts his grip on Stiles. The house is the wrong kind of silent.  
          
The night is long.  
          
        +  
          
          
Here are the facts:  
          
After Jackson turns to a werewolf the correct way, after Gerard’s bite fails spectacularly with gross black fluids everywhere, there are only three weeks of school left before summer. What happens is that Jackson and Lydia get back together, and Allison and Scott break up. Allison and Chris try to patch up the mess Gerard left behind, and to figure out what happened to the man after the showdown at the warehouse. Derek avoids Scott. Actually, no one sees Derek for about a week but Isaac who doesn’t share his information. Isaac gets closer to Scott and Stiles, too. It’s sort of weird at first, none of them really friends or friendly, Stiles and Isaac riling each other up, but soon the trio makes it work. It’s not easy, but knowledge of supernatural and a common love of lacrosse, comics, and video games does wonder.  
          
The table configuration at lunch changes day to day. Sometimes it’s all the lacrosse players and associated, which means that Lydia reigns over the table and exchange pointed barbs with Stiles under Jackson’s annoyed eyes. And that’s how Lydia’s and Stiles’ dynamic start to change, with gossip and knowledge and sarcasm and a tally of Jackson’s facial configurations. Sometimes it’s Isaac and Stiles and Scott. Sometimes it’s Allison and Lydia in a corner, Scott looking at them with his sad eyes. Aside from Lydia, Allison doesn’t talk to anyone much, early on.  
  
The tables changes. Their relations change. And the way the rest of Beacon Hills High sees their loosely defined group changes too, one rumor at the time, passed down mouth to ear until the end of the year.  
  
No-one knows where Erica and Boyd are— and to tell the truth, the first week, no-one _asks_. Stiles figures they are licking their wounds somewhere, maybe with Derek since the guy is their alpha. Both Allison and Chris Argent had sworn the teens had been let go before the showdown at the warehouse and Scott had confirmed they were telling the truth. Stiles thought Boyd and Erica were hiding. Hiding had seemed to be a good plan, he had thought when his own face turned from red and purple to yellow and green. He doesn’t hide, though, and he goes to class, and he practices with Scott. Sometimes Isaac is there too, sometimes Jackson and Danny too, and isn’t that a change of pace? Jackson is almost civil to him and Scott. It’s enough to make Stiles wonder out loud if his Adderall had been cut with something, the first time it happens.  
  
The weekend of the first week After The Warehouse —and it’s easier to count in Before and After for Scott and Stiles, like always— Stiles and Scott go for a run in the Preserve to work on their endurance. That’s how they find Boyd and Erica, smelling like nothing, a black hole in the middle of the forest, still in the clothes Stiles last saw them in, asleep or appearing to be. That’s how they find Derek, later, who had been running around his territory to strengthen the perimeter. He had been trying to find Erica and Boyd, too. And then, there's the mark on his house’s door that Isaac already knew about that only announces more troubles. And later, it's Peter, alive, a fact which only strengthen the alliance between Lydia and Stiles. There are tensions between Scott and Derek, accusations, demands for information that Derek meet with crossed arms and an unwavering stare and few answers. It goes on until Scott realizes that Derek doesn’t know any more than the rest of them. That Derek might look older and technically hold more power but he’s just like them. That he's thrown into situations they know nothing about. That Derek is alone, and scared.    
  
After Jackson turns into a werewolf, after Gerard’s bite fails spectacularly with gross black fluids everywhere, there are only three weeks of school left before summer. There are only three weeks of breathing room, the calm before the storm, and during that time there is no pack, only groups of individuals barely speaking to each other.  
          
        +  
          
        There’s a little more space on the bed. It’s not what wakes Scott, not immediately. He can hear people in the house, and two heartbeats with him, and water running in the main bathroom. For a moment, he forgets. It’s warm and cozy and quiet and safe, it’s _home_ and _pack_.  
          
        Something falls to the floor in the kitchen and breaks. This is what wakes Scott completely. He sits up, and it barely bothers Stiles and Isaac on either side of him. Isaac rolls into the warm spot, and Stiles exhales noisily, before grabbing his pillow. Scott pushes his hearing to count who is there, and who is not, tiptoes through the first floor. The guest room is empty, and so is his mother’s room. He starts to climb down the stairs, and he can pinpoint two people in the kitchen. One of them is Boyd, he knows. Even from that far, he sounds calm to Scott’s ears. Boyd’s a little like Derek, in many aspects, though the feelings they give Scott are opposite. There isn’t much that faze Boyd, and it gives off something that translate to steadiness and grounding and calm in Scott’s changed brain. Derek, on the other hand, is covered angry restlessness.  
  
Derek is up and busying himself at the stove when Scott enters the kitchen. Boyd is sitting at the table, a steaming mug of coffee and a plate of pancakes in front of him.  
  
“Hey,” says Scott.  
  
Derek glances at him, not even turning completely, and nods a greeting. He focus back on the stove— there’s bacon frying, another pile of pancakes in progress.  
  
Boyd nods, too. “Sit down,” he tells Scott. “He’s been like that since he woke up,” he adds, making a small movement with his head toward Derek.  
  
“And he can hear you,” is the answer Derek’s back gives them.  
  
Derek seems okay, to Scott. He’s awake, for one, enough to be cranky and keeping himself busy. There’s still a scent of blood clinging to him, but it’s almost covered by the bacon and the burning fat. Derek’s hands, lowering the heat of the stove, grabbing a fork, a plate, seems healed. He can’t see the marks on Derek’s chest, obviously. Maybe the scent of blood is just from the fact that those are the same clothes he’s been in for the past… three days now?  
  
Scott can’t see what broke and woke him up. Not that it really matters. He’d just want to know.  
  
The next thing he knows, Derek puts a plate of pancakes in front of him. “You can get the rest yourself,” he says, and Scott thinks that three weeks ago he’d have said something in return, he’d have been angry, he’d have thought Derek was being an asshole. Derek is kind of an asshole. Derek is also nicer than he acts like most of the time.  
  
So Scott says “Thanks,” gets up to grab his mom’s blueberry jam and a cup of coffee. The marks on Derek’s chest looked like they were still here, poking out from the stretched collar in reddened flesh and black thread.  
  
He hears the water shutting off, upstairs, a door, another, Stiles talking.  
  
“I called Chris,” Derek says.  
  
Scott raises his head, refocusing on what is going on in the kitchen. Derek and Chris can, under the right circumstances, be in the same room and not be at each other’s throat, but their relation never changed to sharing information willingly, even now. Boyd catches Scott’s eye and nods in Derek’s direction, as if to reinforce Scott’s confused surprise and emphasize the alpha’s words. And it is the capital-a Alpha talking here, their supposed head of the pack and leader.  
  
Derek ignores their exchange and keeps talking to the pan and pile of pancakes he is still adding to. “I think I can describe what attacked me, and he said they had information from their side too.”  
  
“Are they coming here?”  
  
“Yes.” One more pancake, a scrap of spoon against a bowl, the sizzling of batter on a hot surface. “And before you ask, everyone will be there, including Allison. Do you have paper somewhere?”  
  
Scott tilts his head to the side. The paper question seemed to come out of nowhere. “What for?” Derek, predictably, doesn’t answer. “You can always use one of my notebooks, it’s not like I’m using them right now.”  
  
“In your room?”  
  
“Yeah,” says Scott. He watches Derek as he nods, and finishes cooking the last pancake, and shuts off the stove, and leaves the kitchen— but not before Derek _looks_ at Boyd. Like Derek is trying to memorize him, or convince himself Boyd is here and there. The intensity of that look makes a shiver runs up Scott’s spine. It doesn’t feel normal or comfortable.  
  
“Like I said,” says Boyd, unfazed, once the alpha’s steps can be heard on the stairs, “he’s been like that since he woke up. He made your mom lunch.” Then Boyd goes back to his pancakes.  
  
Scott turns in his chair, as if he can see Derek through the walls and floor. Instead, Erica dressed in a pair of Scott’s sweatpants and a towel around her head appears.  She's followed by Stiles, wearing the same clothes he went to bed with and sporting pillow marks on his face. Erica goes straight to the pile of pancakes by the stove, letting her hand trails on Boyd’s shoulder on the way. Stiles sits next to Scott, steals his coffee, his phone gripped in his other hand.  
  
“Dad won’t be coming to our war council. There’s been a— they found a body.”  
  
Isaac enters on that, goes for the pancakes Erica left. Scott pushes his plate to Stiles, fork pointing to him, with the ease of habit. Stiles, when left to his own devices and medication, tends to forget to eat. Scott got used to help that by giving him food, in the same way Stiles carried an extra emergency inhaler for Scott until it wasn’t needed anymore.  
  
“Do we know if it’s related?” Scott asks.  
  
Stiles shrugs, doesn’t look at anyone in the room. “He wasn’t chatty about it. ’Said it might have been a couple of days, so about the same time…” He uses the fork he hasn’t used for the food yet to point upstairs. Then the fork stabs the nearest piece of food, the tines squeaking on the ceramics below. “We know fuck all!”  
  
The outburst is— expected and unexpected.  
  
Erica, leaning against the counter, clacks her teeth around her fork. “We should share info.”  
  
“No, really? In case you weren’t there the last time, that’s all we’ve been doing and there is no info!”  
  
“Fuck you Batman, it’s too early for your attitude.” Erica twists around to put her plate on the counter, leaving her hands free. “We don’t talk about what happens when we’re under, under the curse, in the nightmare, or whatever the fuck is really going on. I think we should.” Shocked silence and shared glances greet her proposition. She takes the towel off her head, crosses her arms, lifts her chin. There’s a lock of wet hair clinging to the side of her face. “I’ll go first then—“ She stops.  
  
Scott looks up at the ceiling. All the wolves lift their head, focusing on the rapid heartbeat that just changed to frenetic.  
  
“What’s going on?” asks Stiles, looking at them.  
  
Scott rises, “Derek,” and Erica is on his heels. He just makes a sign for Isaac and Boyd to stay where they are, and they do, to his surprise. On the stairs, Scott hears Stiles’ footsteps right behind them, can hear his heartbeat.  
  
Scott makes sure he’s the first one in the room.  
  
He expected— Derek under attack, Derek going under again even if so far no-one went under twice in a row, something, anything. All he sees is his room in the usual mess, the couple of bags Isaac and Boyd brought filled with clothes, his desk and the pile of school supplies he left there, his closet held open by his lacrosse stick.  
  
“Derek?”  
  
The frantic heartbeat doesn’t slow down, and all three of them can hear something fall down. The in-suite bathroom is a small one, and Derek is anything but a small man. Sitting between the tub and half-way under the sink, Derek is trying to make himself as small as he can, his arms pressed against his chest. He's panting, each breath that makes it out hissing.  
  
At his feet, there is a broken pencil and an open notebook with a good sketch of a face, and Scott’s toothbrush.  
  
“What’s happening to him?” asks Erica.  
  
Derek isn’t looking at them— his eyes are tightly shut, his face beaded with sweat. Scott smells fresh blood. He crouches down, grabs the notebook and the pen and hands them out to Erica to have the space to get closer.  
  
“Derek?”  
  
“Don’t—“ Derek presses his arms closer, smearing dark stains on his shirt. No, smearing blood, that is where the smell of blood is coming from. “Don’t come closer!” He’s out of breath now, mouth uselessly open.  
  
“Scott, Erica, get out,” says Stiles. He stares at Derek, beyond Scott’s and Erica’s backs.  
  
“What?”  
  
Stiles pushes Erica gently, gets in what little space is left in the bathroom. “Derek, hey man, you’re okay here.”  
  
Scott tries to pushes him back, “Hey dude, it’s not safe for you, he could—“  
  
“He’s not going to do anything to me, Scott,” Stiles says, his eyes still on Derek. “He’s not losing control. You’re not, Derek, you’re past that. But can you tell me what’s up with you?”  
  
“I can’t— I can’t—“ Derek’s mouth is open, searching for air, and he’s rocking slightly, pressing himself into the wall. “What’s happening to me?”  
  
Scott, from the corner of his eyes, sees Erica turns and sit down on his bed, the notebook pressed against her chest like a shield. He’d like to do the same, and to give that shield to Derek, and to be able to do anything else than stand there helpless.  
  
“I think you’re having a panic attack, dude. You’re going to be fine, you just— distractions work, usually, thinking about something else, anything else.” Derek’s leg, and his bare foot, is close to Stiles’ hand. “Okay if I touch you? I’m not going to hurt you, I swear, I don’t think my puny humanness can make a dent into you anyway.”  
  
“Stiles—“  
  
“Scott, I’m gonna be fine, and so will Derek. You’re the one who can keep the group from devolving into a three rings circus, and they are probably getting there. You’re needed downstairs.”  
  
Scott stares at Stiles, a bit— and Stiles stares right back. That’s the Stiles Scott is used to, the one with a plan, with an idea, the one he hadn’t seen in a few days. It feels good to have him back. Scott gets up, squeezing his shoulder.  
  
“That’s it, leave the big bad wolf to me, y’can leave Erica with us though if you’re worried that anything untoward is gonna happen.”  
  
“Stiles, shut up.” It’s hashed and not loud enough, but Derek looks marginally less tense. His eyes are still closed, his hands still in tight bleeding fists, but the foot closer to Stiles is now extended to brush him. “Scott— Scott, the drawing…”  
  
Erica sits up, looks at what she has in hands. Scott sees her frowning. It had only been a face—  
  
“Is it what attacked you?”  
  
Derek only nods, fast, starts panting again. Scott hears the doorbell rings, downstairs, the door opening, people entering. He missed the sounds of the cars parking in front of the house.  
  
“Thank you,” Scott says. Then he leaves his bathroom, leaves space for Stiles and Derek. Stiles was right— Derek can’t help them, right now. Stiles neither. But Stiles can help Derek. Scott will have to lead the meeting.  
  
Erica is holding the notebook out to him. “I’ll stay here. Just in case. Call if you need us.” Scott knows she’ll be keeping an ear on downstairs’ proceedings.  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
He glances back one last time before he leaves the room— Erica has gotten up and is leaning on the door to his bathroom, and Derek is silent and Stiles is talking quietly. The face Derek drew stares at him from his hands.  
  
+  
  
Handling it when Derek is unconscious and under the action of the curse is one thing. Handling it when Derek is awake, aware and vulnerable is another. Stiles hasn’t stopped talking in the bathroom in front of Derek. Erica has stopped paying attention to the words, hearing the intent and tone rather than the meaning. It’s kind of… calming, which is not something she associates with Stiles. It seems to be calming Derek, too, if she can judge it by how much physical contact he keeps with Stiles— from a foot to his whole shin to not retreating when Stiles puts a hand on his ankle.  
  
“… and it’s bullshit anyway, Erica can vouch for that, right?”  
  
It startles her. She was staring at Derek’s hand. It was still curled in a fist, still bleeding, and she couldn’t say for sure if the tiny bumps on the back were Derek’s claws going _through his own hands_ or not. _Pain keeps you human, in control,_ and that had been one of the first things he had taught them.  
  
“All I heard was blablabla, Batman. Defense mechanism, you know how it is.”  
  
Stiles pouts. Erica thinks that if Derek didn’t have his eyes closed, he’d have groaned, or pushed Stiles away, that pout is that fake. So she grins at him with all her teeth, listening to Derek’s slowing down breaths. If banter calms him down, he’ll get banter.  
  
“Seriously? Derek, we need to talk about what you’re teaching them, lessons in snarking are not necessary. Find someone else to mentor in all things sarcasm, sarcasm is my thing in this little group.”  
  
“Aw, but someone got to keep you on your toes, we wouldn’t want to to lose your touch…” Erica sits down, sandwiching Derek’s extended leg. His heartbeat remains too fast, but he doesn’t tense up or recoil. She takes that as a good thing.  
  
“And here I thought we’d get along! No torturing me at every turn, Catwoman—“  
  
Derek jerks then, she’d guess at “torturing.”  
  
“Okay, bad choice, sorry— hey Erica, did I ever tell you what happened to Scott the first week or so he was turned?”  
  
Erica follows Stiles’ lead here. He seems to know what he’s doing with panic attacks— if this is what is going on. If this is not worse… She takes a breath in and answers Stiles. “I’m not sure I want to know, if you allow me to be perfectly honest.”  
  
“Story time, I’m in charge here. He panicked, at school— he had no idea what was going on with him, just like you,” and Erica sees Stiles’ rubbing Derek’s leg in a repetitive motion, “I’m guessing the senses overload triggered it, it can’t be easy to have everything suddenly cranked up to 200 percents. He had a panic attack, ran to the lockers, straight into the shower heads. I don’t know what he thought the water would do. S’hard to think at all when nothing’s working right between your ears.”  
  
And now Erica knows that Stiles is talking from experience. The noise Stiles’s hand makes on Derek’s leg is hypnotic. Downstairs, there are noises in the kitchen, several people talking at the same time. Who is talking, she’d need to pay more attention to know, but she’s sure it’s not Scott. She focuses back to Derek and Stiles.  
  
“… and so it tricked him into believing he was an asthma attack. And since he knew how to stop those, it stopped his panic attack. I don’t think shoving an inhaler at you is going to help here, though. Sorry dude. But we’re not letting you go through it on your own, I think I’m getting a lot of experience with the sick puppies to help.”  
  
Derek starts slumping a little more on himself, his hands unclenching bit by bit but shaking. It makes Erica thinks of the last time she had a seizure, the kanima poisoning her and Stiles and Scott helping— Stiles being her Batman.  
  
“We should really give out more codenames, Batman,” she cuts through Stiles’ calming and nonsensical babbling. “Derek can be Superman, just gone neutral instead of lawful.”  
  
“I’d like to hear your reasons as to why and how, but let me tell you that. You. Are. Wrong: Derek is clearly the Red Hood. Let’s list the similarities: sarcastic motherfucker, great thighs, jump to “kill” by default—“  
  
“ ‘least I get things done,” says Derek. He’s blinking, his hands lowered into his lap. “If I’m Jason Todd then Scott has to be Nightwing. Everyone loves him. Everyone will follow him.”  
  
Erica knows she’s looking at him with raised eyebrows. Stiles’s mouth is open a little too wide, and she can’t resist closing it for him with one finger under his jaw.  
  
“ ‘Still surprised I didn’t roll fully formed from under a rock, I see.”  
  
“Dude, warn a guy when you’re geeking out. I might not be able to control my reactions.”  
  
Erica laughs at them. She stops pretty fast when Derek opens his hands and stares at them, blood spreading to his thighs. It doesn’t smell like the wounds from his own claws are still open, but it’s a mess. Stiles inhales sharply next to her. “I’m getting towels and a change of clothes,” she tells them. Boyd’s teeshirt should fit Derek, and so will Scott’s sweatpants.  
  
Before she can move out of the bathroom though, Derek reaches for her, looking straight at her. “He—,” he swallows. “Boyd?”  
  
Erica grabs his hand, smears some of the blood between her fingers. “... Boyd what?” She has no idea how to understand the emotions playing on Derek’s face. He looks like shit. She forces her hearing downstairs, tries to hear Boyd’s voice by reflex. “He’s downstairs, with the others.” By the murmur of voices she can hear, it seems quiet now.  
  
Derek closes his eyes, releases the death grip he had on her hand.  
  
“What was that about?” She asks him, but he doesn’t answer. Not unexpected. Derek keeps things close to his chest, still. While he got better at sharing and talking about the things that are affecting them all, his own emotions and problems are private. Scott had mentioned that a couple time, how it bothered him that Derek didn’t say stuff, usually with a remark that makes her think Scott’s dad is a dick. A pack of misfit toys, that is what they are.  
  
She leaves the bathroom behind her, not paying attention to Stiles’ “Come on, Big Guy, you smell like reheated death” and the sounds of the running shower. She grabs the clothes she had intended to grab, and focuses on downstairs— Boyd’s steady heartbeat, the lull of voices, a kettle whistling. It feels like a break, a breathing moment.  
  
+  
  
Chris doesn’t say anything when Scott gives him the drawing Derek did. Allison peers over her father’s shoulder, fingers linked around a mug of tea, no recognition in her eyes. Scott feels his shoulders drop, a bit.  
  
“Are you sure that’s what Derek saw?” is the only thing Chris asks.  
  
Scott shrugs. “He said that’s who —or what— attacked him.” He doesn’t mention the panic attack, the way Derek seemed to want to disappear on himself in the bathroom upstairs, away from the drawing.  
  
The drawing is good. Like, graphic novel good, the ones Stiles only orders and buys from that shop half an hour away instead of the small comic shop (“It’s poorly shelved, is what it is, Scott! Also who in this day and age does not carry anything other than the big two?” “You bought all the Batman series of this month.” “You, my friend, gets hung up on details.”) they all go to at the mall in Beacon Hills. Scott didn’t know Derek knew how to draw, wouldn’t have imagined him being able to draw that well if he had imagined him drawing at all.  
  
“I can tell you that’s not something I’ve seen in the bestiary, but as most of the illustrations in there are largely illuminations and woodcuts from late medieval and early Renaissance periods, accuracy is not their main purpose,” says Lydia.  
  
There isn’t enough space in the kitchen for all of them. The living room barely fits them. What was left of the pile of pancakes and coffee pot Derek made is in reach of everyone on the coffee table, with extra tea and some of the sandwiches they didn’t eat last night. Only Jackson helped himself to the food, and to Scott, it looks like it was just to fiddle with something. No-one talks about the nightmare, but since it started, Jackson has been— quiet. Subdued. He refuses to leave Lydia’s side. He’s less of a douchebag extraordinaire, as trademarked by Stiles, too. It’s just… unnerving. Scott shakes himself.  
  
“Unless Derek can describe it or has additional information, this is unfortunately useless to us,” says Chris.  
  
Scott closes his eyes and exhales. “There has to be something—“  
  
“What about the body that was found last night?” says Boyd.  
  
Chris frowns at Boyd. “How did you hear about this?”  
  
“Stiles,” answers Isaac, from where he stand next to Boyd.  
  
“The Sheriff called to explain he wouldn’t be there,” says Scott. Deaton is absent too, and Scott’s phone has stayed silent on that subject. Scott— he wishes Deaton was there. The man knows things, a lot of things, and Scott knows he is on his side, whichever that is now.  
  
“The curse periods do not follow a true randomized pattern. If it was, there would have been times when one person would have gone under twice in a row,” says Lydia. “It hasn’t happened.”  
  
“Hasn’t happened yet,” counters Allison, raising her head to look at her friend.  
  
Scott doesn’t understand the silent conversations they have, and probably doesn’t want to. “Could we have just not noticed, because whoever it was just stayed under?” He proposes, to cut through their silent conversation, to keep the subject going. And maybe Erica was right earlier this morning, maybe it was time they talked about what they saw when they went under, if everything was connected, if there was a point to it.  
  
“I’ve thought about that too, and checked the lengths: except for Derek’s, they are all roughly the same,” Lydia says. She finally puts down the notebook she has been fiddling with since she sat down, and grabs Jackson’s hand. He squeezes back, hard.  
  
“What’s different with Derek’s?” Scott asks.  
  
“I’m probably their main target.”  
  
Everyone startles in some way. Scott turns around, surprised he didn’t hear the trio comes down the stairs. Derek is in the middle, wearing sweatpants that Scott knows were last seen in his closet, and a shirt that is large enough to be Boyd’s. It’s large even for Derek, and the collar gapes a little, exposing the stitches— still there, still too dark around red flesh. Scott frowns at the sight of the still unhealed wounds. Derek looks like crap, and Stiles and Erica hovers at his elbows like they expect him to stumble and fall at any moment.  
  
“Derek!” Isaac sounds happy.  
  
“You know what’s going on?” Chris sounds as even and direct as ever.  
  
Derek doesn’t answer immediately, sits in the nearest chair and reaches to grab food. Scott can’t remember if he saw him eat this morning, and he thinks Derek needs more food anyway— and from the way Boyd pushes the plate closer to his alpha, Scott’s not the only one to think so.  
  
“No,” Derek answers. He bites only once in the sandwich he grabs, chewing as if trying to taste every atom from it. “You said you had info,” he finally says.  
  
Chris looks at Allison before answering, which is an interesting new dynamic. Scott remembers her talking about the chain of command in their family, and that the women were the one giving the orders, though Allison had stepped back and followed her father’s experience after Gerard had disappeared. Apparently she was back to be the matriarch.  
  
Allison takes a map out of her jacket’s pocket, and with Lydia’s help they clear the coffee table and spread it. The whole of Beacon Hill is there, with red marks and notes all over.  
  
“We found the same markings all over town and into the Preserve.”  
  
“It could be unrelated, of course,” Lydia interrupts.  
  
“But I doubt it is,” says Chris, taking his phone out and digging through it to find one picture. He places it on the map, so that everyone can see. The picture is of a tree trunk, with a mark carved in. The carving had been done some time ago, as the bark had started to heal over it. The mark itself seemed to be a simple celtic-looking knot, with four loops.  
  
Derek takes another bite of his food, chewing it as deliberately as the previous one.  
  
“There was blood at several of the marks,” Jackson says. “It smelled like it at least.”  
  
“Deaton refused to elaborate when we called him, except to say that it was a mark used both by packs and emissaries,” Lydia says.  
  
“So what are we looking at? With the dead body from last night, it’s what, sacrifices?” Stiles asks, his arms crossed.  
  
Chris’ tone neither confirms or denies Stiles’ theory, “I saw that symbol several years ago. There’s a place in the Preserve called the Nemeton—“  
  
“It’s been there longer than it had a name,” Derek interrupts.  
  
“Can we go at this logically? I’m sure it’s fascinating, but this slow pile-up of information is driving me nuts and so far it’s been completely useless.” Stiles’ words are just this side of biting, his phone held tight in his hand.  
  
“Stiles’s right,” Scott says. The few grumblings and subvocal growls stop at that. “We’re too disorganized.” He looks at every one of them as he says this. “And we never know how much time we have.” _Before someone goes under_ , he doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to.  
  
Everyone nods. Scott swallows, his heart beating a bit faster as he realizes that he puts himself as the leader of their meeting. “Mr. Argent, what’s this symbol?”  
  
“It’s a shield knot. Protection, but also a call to the four elements. Used here— I think it marks boundaries, a territory.”  
  
“Okay, good. Derek, you guys use that?”  
  
“No.” Derek’s food has been put aside back on the plate it had came from, now on the floor to make room for the map. Scott sees Derek gritting his teeth— he doesn’t know what at. Was it the “you guys”? Was it the reminder of his family? “The Hale’s pack mark is the triskele. The territory extends further than this, too.”  
  
“So sacrifices. I was right.” Erica elbows Stiles at that to shut him up, and he lets out a squeak.  
  
“Stiles’ not wrong.” And— that enough to send a lull through the room. Scott doesn’t try to understand Stiles’ and Derek’s relation, and has by now been around Derek long enough to realize that maybe, maybe, his first impression of the guy was wrong. Right at the time though. But wrong in the long run. Derek’s incredibly protective, to the point of being infuriating, and all the people in this room and his mom and Stiles’ dad are people Derek have protected and will protect in the future, even if it means getting claws through the chest, getting paralyzed, or getting shot at by hunters to cover them.  
  
But it doesn’t mean that Derek shows that he respects their input or even listens to them often.  
  
“Like Chris said, that symbol is at the Nemeton,” Derek continues,”The Nemeton’s a place of power in the Preserve. It’s also been used by multiple groups in the past— the shield mark is for the druids.”  
  
“Okay, so druids. What is that guy coming in for?” Allison asks, and holds the sketch Derek made earlier.  
  
No-one misses Derek’s full-body flinch at seeing it.  
  
No-one comments. No-one comments when Erica and Stiles press against Derek and he leans back into them.  
  
Stiles’ phone rings, breaking the tension.  
  
“Go ahead Dad, you’re on speaker.”  
  
“<Is everyone in?>”  
  
“Save for Deaton and Melissa, we’re all accounted for, Sheriff,” Scott says. He can feel a little of the heaviness he’s been carrying since last night leave his shoulders, he can see Stiles sitting up straighter.  
  
“<I have the preliminary report on the body we found last night. While there were evidences of claws and animal marks, the cause of death was exsanguination— the throat was cut by a sharp blade. The weird part come from the fact that there was a piece of rope around the neck.>”  
  
“So they got strangled, and their throat cut?” Stiles asks, his eyes staring at the map still on the table without seeing it. Lydia has the same look in her eyes.  
  
Scott, focused on Stiles and Lydia as he is, misses Derek going still, even stopping to breath for an instant.  
  
Erica doesn’t miss it.  
  
“Sheriff, do we have an ID on it and a time and date of death?” asks Chris.  
  
“<No and no. We’re on it, but the coroner’s report will take a few days.>”  
  
“Dad…,” Stiles starts, drawing the sounds out as if still deep in thoughts. “Was there anything else on the body? On the head?”  
  
Lydia jerks her head up and squeezes Jackson’s hand in hers at the same time. “The threefold death. Strangled, throat cut, hit to the back of the head. It’s a ritual of the British Isles lore, it’s in the bestiary—“  
  
Allison hands her the tablet the most recent version of the book is on, and then leans to get closer to read over her shoulder.  
  
Boyd, who hadn’t stopped frowning since the map came in view (and even since before that, since Derek had walked in), raises his head from staring at his crossed arms and leans closer to the phone, where the Sheriff was answering by the negative to Stiles’s question and repeating that he’d know when he’d get the coroner’s report. “Sheriff, where was the body found?”  
  
There’s a rustle of paper on the phone. “<Off the road that goes west to the Tate’s farm. Coordinates latitude north, 40 degrees, 43 minutes, 26 point 212 seconds, longitude west 12 degrees, 21 degrees, 46 point 71 seconds.>”  
  
Boyd takes Isaac’s hands to help him traces the coordinates on the map. He then looks for a pen, get one from Chris, and marks the location of the body with a blue cross.  
  
It falls right between two points marked by the shield knot.  
  
“How does this help?” asks Isaac.  
  
“<What’s going on?>” asks the Sheriff.  
  
“The place the body was found falls between two—“ starts Scott. “How do we even call them? Shield knots? Druid marks?”  
  
“I’m sending you the picture, Dad,” Stiles says, and proceeds to do so by using Scott’s phone.  
  
“There’s going to be at least two more bodies found killed that way, at least according to the bestiary,” says Lydia.  
  
“And it will follow a pattern— same occupation, or same name, or same age, some measure of similarity,” continues Allison.  
  
Derek continues to wilt, hunching down on himself, the move still unnoticed from all but Erica.  
  
“<Are you sure it’s linked to the rest of the— events?>”  
  
There’s a brief noise, like a cough, coming from Derek, before he can form words. “Yes.”  
  
They all look at him, the dim noise of ten people working on the same problem stopping. He looks back, a little too pale, a little too unsteady.  
  
“It’s— the second phase of their plan.”  
  
“Plan? since when—“ Jackson gets cut by Chris.  
  
“How much do you know?”  
  
Derek stares back, keeps silent.  
  
“No, we are not falling back into a hunter vs. werewolf feud!”  
  
“Stiles, excuse me for not feeling enthusiastic about handing out knowledge about my kind to them!”  
  
“We’re all in the same boat here! What do you know?” says Scott —no, demands—, and he only sees Derek clenches his jaw tighter on his secrets.  
  
“<I have to go,>” says the Sheriff from the phone. “<Derek, good to hear you, son. Everyone, be careful. Stiles?>”  
  
Stiles takes the phone, switches the speaker off. The next words are private, and taken in the kitchen.  
  
Scott, Derek and Chris are still involved in a three-way stare match when Stiles comes back. He sighs, and positions himself just outside of their gathering. It gets him nods, slight ones from Boyd and Erica, and from Allison and Lydia. It makes Scott swallows back the growl that was threatening to break out and take a breath in. He recognizes that Stiles is deliberately putting himself in a neutral position, out of their group.  
  
“Let’s go at it logically. One, we all get horrific nightmares. It’s a pain in the ass.” There’s a couple snorts at the understatement. “Two, Derek gets attacked, and it’s still not healed, but we have the face of what did it. Three, those shield knot marks pop up all over Beacon Hills, might or might not have sacrifices associated with them. Four, the Nemeton, or place of power, whatever it is, is in Beacon Hills. It has one of the shield knot marks, has had it for a long time. Five, there’s a dead body potentially killed via the threefold death, potentially a sacrifice. Six, Derek said he was probably the target.” He takes a breath. “Did I forget anything?”  
  
He gets headshakes all around.  
  
“Good. Now, how is everything linked together?”  
  
“I think the shield knots are following a pattern,” Lydia starts. “Is the nemeton on the map?”  
  
Chris shakes his head. “I was there once, and I could never find it again.” He looks at Derek, who looks like words are pieces of glass— the moment he’ll open his mouth, there’ll be nothing but hurt and blood. Scott wonders for an instant where that image is coming from. He’ll blame his own nightmares.  
  
Derek shakes his head. “I don’t know where it is.”  
  
Lydia and Allison look frustrated with their responses.  
  
“Okay,” Stiles sighs. “Next?”  
  
“Deaton should be there,” Scott says. “He knows more about this—“  
  
“No.”  
  
Scott sighs, frustrated. “Derek, can you help for a second? What’s your problem? Deaton has knowledge we don’t, and he’s been here a lot longer than any of us.”  
  
“He’s a druid.”  
  
That is definitively new information, the infuriating kind. The breath Scott lets out through his nose is loud. “So what? You think he’s doing it? Is there anyone you’ll ever trust?”  
  
“Scott,” says Chris, and Scott turns his head to him. Out of the corner of his eyes, he can see Erica moves, almost draping herself on Derek, and Derek allows it, hands clenched in his lap. “I’d like to know what else Derek knows,” and on cue, Allison holds the portrait up. Derek doesn’t quite look at it, still.  
  
“… I know them as djinns, even if it’s not the right name,” Derek says. Despite the warning, Lydia goes to the bestiary, pulling pages up. “Most stay away from humans and supernaturals, in groups. They feed on dreams and memories. And… sometimes they can make you see dreams and memories.” He pauses, looking at nothing. “There are stories that go that they get enthralled to be used to destabilize people— breaking bonds, families. After too long watching dreams, people stop remembering what’s real and what’s not.”  
  
His last words turn the room silent enough that they can hear the quiet buzz of the fridge, a room away, the birds outside. Scott can hear Derek’s heart, loud and too fast.  
  
“The Hale pack,” Derek continues, slow, low, like he doesn’t want them to hear, not really, “the Hale pack is a guardian. There’s always been a place of power here, there’s always been a guardian. Take the pack out, you take the guardian out, you have access to almost unlimited power and a secure territory.”  
  
“And when destabilizing us with the nightmares didn’t work, whoever wants Beacon Hills escalated to murder and sacrifices,” finishes Stiles.  
  
“Are we going to be put under again?” Isaac asks.  
  
“I don’t know,” Derek says. “I don’t know.”    
  
“We have a better idea of what’s going on, at least.” Scott sits up straighter. “Now we need a plan of attack.”  
  
Stiles perks up. “Yes, I like this, let’s find whoever has been fucking with us and kill them dead so we can get on with having a summer break. I was thinking weekend beach trip. Who’s with me?”  
  
Scott shakes his head a little. That’s the most reaction Stiles gets for his attempt at lightening the atmosphere.  
  
“We still don’t know exactly what and who we’re up against.” Chris’ words throw them back into the situation at hand. “We have druid markings, a djinn, and potentially more than one. Taking territory is a pack move— werewolves, selkies, the seelie and unseelie court do that, as well as a number of creatures more rarely seen.”  
  
“We have more than one group trying to take over?” asks Isaac, hands clenching and unclenching nervously.  
  
“I think we have a well-organized group with multiple players,” says Chris.  
  
Scott stands up, takes a breath. “We’re not going to resolve anything hunched around a table. Let’s take a break.”  
  
+  
  
Derek flees to the kitchen. Erica expected that, had taken a step back from him when Scott had taken control of the situation and called for a break.  
  
Leadership looked good on McCall. Him being an asshole to her Alpha made her want to claw his face. She tilts her head to the side, half-dried locks sliding against her neck, as Scott and Chris and Allison made a little cluster on one side of the couch, Lydia, Jackson and Isaac on the other, Stiles and Boyd having slipped on Derek’s heels. Derek is… her Alpha. And that is a singularly different thought than “all of those people are mine, mine to protect” which she developed first with Boyd and Isaac, and then with every single person in the group one after the other— though still withholding judgment on Allison and Chris (but she knows, she knows that if it come to it, she’ll fight with them).  
  
Whatever plan had been planned to break the pack, it had failed. It had brought them together.  
  
She stretches, grabs the almost-full plate of food, and chooses the sandwich Derek had picked at, eating it without tasting it.  
  
Then, and only then, she goes to the kitchen, following the heartbeats of Stiles and Boyd and her Alpha.  
  
Derek’s on the floor, not quite in the same position as earlier in the bathroom, but too close for Erica’s peace of mind. He’s sandwiched between Boyd and Stiles, holding on to Boyd’s hands for dear life.  
  
Boyd looks up at her when she approaches, and he looks confused and scared. She knows she has the same look on her face. She’s never seen Derek like this, even after his previous bouts of curse. The djinn, or the attack, must have really shaken him up.  
  
She sits down, crossing her legs so they touch Derek’s and Boyd’s. Stiles smiles at her a little from Derek’s other side, plastered against him like he’s about to fuse them together and create a new entity.  
  
She can put things in motion. She can. She can help. _She’s alive_ , she can’t help but think. “I don’t know if you heard, earlier, but I think we should talk about our nightmares.”  
  
Derek shudders, keeps his eyes closed. She sighs. “Like I said, I’ll go first.” Stiles and Boyd keep silent, their heart rates rising.  
  
“In the mirror verse, I’m dead.” Derek flinches, presses himself against Stiles, tighten his grip on Boyd. She continues. “That’s it. There is nothing to do, nothing to see. It’s kinda peaceful, but it’s also nothingness. When I wake up, my heart hurts like it doesn’t know it’s not supposed to want to stop. I’m dead because when I left with Boyd, we got caught. We get caught by a pack of alphas, and they want to use us against you and the pack, and they lock us up and leave us to rot.”  She extends her hand, wraps her fingers around Boyd’s ankle, warm and alive.  
  
“I thought someone would come after us, but after a while, it becomes clear we have to do our own saving. I don’t do damsel in distress well. So to give us a chance to do something, I jump the bitch alpha that caught us at first one night, and I kick her ass, and she kicks mine and I’m dead.” She’s not looking at her friends. “The end.”  
  
“I—“ Derek starts. He clears his throat. “I find you. In the. Nightmare. I find your—“ He can’t finish, his breath hitching.  
  
Erica unfolds and launches herself at him. He holds her back tight, and Boyd and Stiles have moved too, so that they are all hugging and piled on each other. It shuts out the murmur of voices and rustling clothes coming from the other room, too.  
  
It’d be nice, if it weren’t for the circumstances.  
  
“There’s a pack of alphas, too. In— my curse,” says Derek, the words muffled in someone’s shoulder. “They want me to join them, by killing the pack, or killing myself or— I don’t know,” and his breathing sounds wet. “I don’t know, and I’m hoping it ends soon and now it— it gave me my sister back and then they hold me down and use my hands and kill Boyd.” The last words get out in a rush, and at first she’s not sure she heard everything. Then there’s a “Oh my god, _Derek_ ” from one side and “Fuck, no, I’m okay, I’m right _here_ ” from the other and they hold on.  
  
They hold on and don’t say anything about “it gave me my sister back” because what can they say? Erica catches on the _hoping it ends soon_ , and when she raises her head a little, Stiles is looking at her. He caught that, too. He probably caught a lot more, connected a lot more things, heard what Derek wasn’t saying that’s hurting him. Derek and Stiles— they are getting closer to each other than anyone else is, at the exception of Scott and Stiles.  
  
When Derek breathes a little easier, when the hug gives a little more space to be, Derek opens his eyes, look at them.  
  
“You shouldn’t— I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”  
  
“Shut the fuck up,” Erica and Boyd say together, both hitting the closest part of him they can reach.  
  
“What they said,” agrees Stiles. “Don’t think for one minute that anything that’s going is in any way your fault. However I have questions, and it can’t turn into whatever was going on in the living room.”  
  
Before Derek can say anything, Boyd pokes him in the shoulder. “And while you guys do that, you should eat and drink something.”  
  
They sit at the table, to do that, a pack of crackers and a pot of peanut butter in front of Derek. The meeting (“three-ring circus,” repeats Stiles) is still on a break, and no-one has come to look for them.  
  
“Okay. Question one: what’s the nemeton, exactly? “Place of power” is kinda vague.”  
  
Derek shrugs one shoulder. “That’s what it is— the place I know is… a root cellar, in the preserve. The tree was cut, or hacked down, years before I was even born. The inside had one of the shield mark, on the largest root.”  
  
“Where is it?”  
  
“I don’t know.” He holds half a cracker, hard enough to crumble it a little. Erica can’t help but frown when she realizes he’s still not eating, even if Stiles waited for him to eat one cracker before his first question.  
  
“But you’ve been there?!”  
  
“Yes.” He glances at the living room— no-one is visible from here. “Alphas can— influence or change memories, if they wish to. I’ve been there more than once, during a bad time for Beacon Hills, then my alpha took the memories away. It was too dangerous to go there again, or to know about it at all.”  
  
“What about the— djinn?” Asks Boyd.  
  
Derek’s hand goes to the collar of his shirt. “I— don’t know more than what I said earlier. It tried to hurt me directly though.”  
  
“Does that mean something specific?” asks Stiles, eyes on the mess Derek is making of the crackers.  
  
“I think the original plan changed.”  
  
“I think it failed,” says Erica, and when they all look at her, she shrugs. “What? You said it yourself, they’re used to mojo minds and destabilize people. We didn’t get destabilized, if anything it made us a better group. Plan A failed. That,” she points at Derek’s wounds, “is plan A failing spectacularly.”  
  
Derek eats the crumbs on his fingers absently while rubbing at the stitches. “Or it’s the start of plan B…”  
  
“Wait, you’re thinking—“ and Boyd makes a motion with one finger from one side of his throat to the other.  
  
“Taking the alpha out would destabilize for sure,” Stiles jumps in, “but now that we know that druids or close enough are involved, would they, er, use body parts to fuel a ritual or something?”  
  
Erica makes a face, Derek rubs his.  
  
“Yeah. It’s not common. Deaton would know.”  
  
  


* * *

[second part is the result of the Alpha pack's and Darach's sacrifices and attempts to take over Beacon Hills. Alpha Pack and Darach are allied in this AU. The second part was written first and wasn't entirely edited to reflect the changes brought by the first part]  
+  
  
People are talking fast, and he knows those voices somehow, and he needs to _breath_ — and then there are hands on him, keeping him still, and other things, touching him, burning him. Everything hurts— inside, outside, not enough air, his throat raw. A bright burst of panic, overpowering wolfsbane. He doesn't think about anything anymore.  
  
Later. It’s hard to get smells, they stick to his throat and nose, but… it smells like— like white. Like sunlight on a clean white wall and cold air, and safe, and the woods, and home _pack_. The last one… the last one is strange. Too long, he thinks, floats. Nothing has smelled like that in six years. Things only smelled of Laura, and him, and the past. Things only smelled of smoke and warm ashes stuck to his nose.  
  
Sleep is hard. Six years, he thinks, six years. Of half-sleeping. And still he is sleeping now. It’s… right.  
  
He floats for a moment, things feeling not-quite-right, not quite wrong. It’s drawn on his face, stretched across his shoulders, wrapped around his ribs, trailing burning fingers along his arm, air rattling under his sternum. The smell of _safe-home-family_ drifts to him again when he moves a bit against something soft. The scent slows his breathing down.  
  
He doesn't catch the moment he slips into sleep again —but he notices when he is _here_ again. He feels disjointed and off. Everything is just a little off, a little to the side. Just thinking is slow, and there are things he knows are missing but he can’t grasp them. He heard voices before, known voices, he knows them but the faces and the scents they belong to vanish like a fistful of smoke.  
  
His face hurts.  
  
His chest hurts.  
  
What smells like home _pack_ in his arms is a stuffed cylinder of soft spotted rabbit fur. He had one, a long time ago. It was a security blanket, for young ones, the rabbit fur scented by the whole pack so that the barely developed sense of smell of a pup would not make the kid believe the pack disappeared into thin air when they were out of range. That’s the only thing that feels and smells right in the room, even if it is accompanied by a niggling sense of wrongness in the back of his head, like an insistent single claw scratching at the back door.  
  
The rest of the scents is indistinct, forces him to focus in a way he never had to before. There is the smell of the room itself, white and clean and cold and like nothing he has smelled before —and he knows there is something off with it, something’s wrong— and his own scent. He smells stale and sick, and if the heaviness in his limbs is any sign, he’s been there and that way for a while. He realizes he has no idea how long he has slept. He realizes he has no idea where _there_ is, what happened.  
  
He tries to get up. That he knows. He doesn't know how he has ended up on the floor, coughing his lungs out and smelling Scott— no, not Scott, Scott's mother, Mrs. McCall, Melissa, Melissa’s voice, footsteps, her heartbeat. She’s safe, as safe as he can allow himself to trust. Is he in the hospital? His hands are numb, and slip on the cold tiles. He flinches and almost lashes out when she gets too close. He doesn't want to hurt her, but he is confused and vulnerable, open to attack, too cold. There were things stuck to him, stuck into him. Something’s wrong. He can’t stop coughing, he can’t manage to get air in. He has to fight the urge to lash out again, to protect himself, to pretend he is stronger than he is, that he isn't an easy prey.  
  
He hears Melissa cry out, for Apprentice Stilinski to come in and help and that bit makes no sense.  
  
He can’t breath and the rising panic is not helping— to move, to see, to breath. The last time... the last time he was in such a position of vulnerability, it was at Kate's hands, burned alive with his back in the dust, burned alive and displayed like a piece of meat. It was because of Kate's bullet, Kate's wolfsbane, Kate's baton and the way she smiled when she switched the electricity on. Kate is dead, but she hadn't been the only hunter there, she wasn't the only person who wanted him dead, and he needs safety, he needs to go away he needs—  
  
He breaks down in another coughing fit, feeling his entire frame rattle, and it keeps rattling as he shakes with cold.  
  
He hears _Derek, Derek, can you hear me, you're fine, you're going to be fine, and you ripped your IV out, your oxygen, your heart monitor_ , and _take a breath as deep as you can, there you go, another one, you're going to be fine, you're going to be fine, just fine._ Something on his face— it’s too hard to breathe, too hard to keep track of what’s going on. Melissa’s hands are warm on his head. Derek wonders distantly if she ever did that to Scott when he was little, if she still does it. He’s gone before he registers the sounds of many feet on the floor.  
  
+  
"We were afraid it was the Plague— that's why you're isolated. No were can get near you until we're sure it wasn't that and that you're not contagious." Deaton, in the room, right next to him. Oh. Derek is awake again. He feels— he has never hit by a truck, but possibly this is what it feels like, once you know you are going to live.  
  
The room is the same, smells the same than earlier, cold and white and sick. Earlier— but when? Deaton keeps going. "We were afraid for a moment that the fever was going to damage your brain." Deaton looks off, sounds off. It’s the same feeling, of not-quite-right, of something going on he should have been cluing on—  
  
"Plague?" One word is enough to kick in yet another coughing fit, from deep inside. It shakes everything, hurts deep.  
  
Deaton moves. He does something to the side, and soon there is a high pitched hiss fighting to cover the noises ripping his lungs apart, and a large, too warm hand on his shoulder that Derek can't escape.  
  
"Breathe, Derek— as deep as you can." Derek thinks of ripping his hand off him, of flipping him off, tries to breath with little success. He can feel them now, the nasal cannulas he ripped off his face when he tried to get up earlier. He can feel the hard push of white and clean and cold air into him. His vision starts to grey out at the edges. He closes his eyes. The fit dies down, leaves the air rattling under his breastbone.  
  
"Better," he hears Deaton say. The hand leaves, thankfully. "Yes, Plague. Since you were just coming back from the East, and collapsed in the Market Place, you caused quite the stir. We managed to test every were and shifter who was in direct contact with you here and warned the others on the road." Nothing makes sense. The east? Market place? Shifters? Derek can hear the words, understands them, but strung together they make no sense. Deaton goes on, oblivious. "No-one else so far has fallen ill. You'll still remain isolated for the coming week."  
  
Derek opens his mouth and the air burns the back of his throat. It tastes cold and metallic. "What's wrong with me?"  
  
"That remains to be confirmed, now that you are awake and aware." He can hear Deaton's heartbeat, steady and getting closer. There’s a rustle of fabric, mechanical beeps. "But you are responding to the Plague treatment rather well. I think you'll get out without lasting effects."    
  
Derek’s frustration and anger are mounting. Deaton is fiddling with the machines on the side. Derek takes a careful breath, paces his words to avoid coughing again: "What the fuck is going on?" He tries to sat up, to call the shift—  
  
He has to stop the instant he starts, overcome with dizziness. Deaton's hands are on his shoulders again, and he doesn’t have the strength to hide his flinch. It’s close enough for him to smell Deaton— and the man should have smelled of the animals he works with, beside his own scent and something Derek tasted like electricity that he suspects is magic and the lingering traces of Scott. The scents of animals and Scott are absent. Even if Deaton hasn't been in the animal clinic all day, the scents would have remained. But there is nothing. Derek buries his fear and confusion under anger. "Who are you?"  
  
Deaton, if that is him, frowns. "Do you know who you are?"  
  
"Yes," Derek does his best to snarl, the expression tight on his face and an itch to cough in his throat. "Answer my question."  
  
"And do you know where you are?"  
  
"Enough!" That’s too much, the dizziness catching up on him, the panic from the lack of familiarity, lack of scents, lack of _right_ catching up to him. Derek is more stubborn than his body can handle. That’s how he stayed alive, how he had faced Peter, how he had faced the Argents—  
  
There was what was missing, what is still missing— the whole pack meeting in Scott’s house and Deaton a voice on the phone, summer creeping in and bringing nightmares people couldn’t wake from, Erica and Boyd dead but not and the feeling of panic held at bay in a tiny bathroom, druid shield marks on trees in his territory and dead bodies found sacrificed under them. There is no scent of his pack here, no scent of gunpowder and electricity and coffee, no teenage deodorant and make up, no vaguely wet dog and no Stiles— it smells scrubbed clean and empty and he can’t trust that the Deaton right here and now is Deaton. He can’t trust that anyone is who they look like. He can’t trust that he’s safe. Who knows what’s in the machines, in the IV tapped to his arm that burns cold and black up his veins?  
  
He’s on the floor again, kneeling-crouching because there’s no strength in his legs. He can’t feel if his claws are out. He keeps coughing and shaking his head instead of growling to keep this Deaton away from him.  
  
"Derek!" Melissa, this Melissa McCall again, other people at the door— none of them werewolves, none of them _his_. Can he get answers from her? Can he— she’s a mother, and that he can trust. She’s answered his questions in the past, she's opened her house to him. There’s the phantom warmth of her hands, her voice telling him he’ll be fine, too. He doesn’t know when that memory’s from, where it is from. He lets her get closer, growls at Deaton-not-Deaton in what little breath he had left. He needs answers. He needs to breath.  
  
"Derek, we should stop meeting like this," says Melissa. Her smile is hopeful, like she is waiting for a reaction at her joke at the same time she knows how lame it was.  
  
"What's going on?" He asks, between labored breaths. He’d prefer coughing his lungs out to the slow choking, the grey nipping at the edges of his vision from lack of air and dizziness.  
  
"I need you to breath slowly, and in," and here Deaton-not-Deaton hands her a translucent mask, "this."  
  
He darts a clumsy hand at the mask, knocking it away from him. "No," he says, the sound stuck in his throat.  
  
Melissa is very still next to him, her hand warm on his shoulder. Deaton's head moves to follow the mask's trajectory. A pitiful trajectory it is. He has no strength, no way to defend himself— no, he can't panic, not like this, not here, wherever here was.  
  
"Derek," says Melissa, "can you tell me why?"  
  
"He," and he looks up at Deaton at that, over her shoulder, "doesn't smell _right_."  
  
Melissa frowns, and still her hands are warm on him. They shouldn't feel so warm to him. The whole room shouldn't feel as cold as a New York winter, but it is. A shiver runs up his back.  
  
"Your sense of smell is muted right now, because of the drugs in the oxygen, and you can't decide to not take them— you need to breath and right now you can't without the drugs."  
  
"No," he starts to shake his head. He stops when the dizziness comes rushing back, when nausea comes into play. Whoever this Melissa really is, she still smells like Scott and like antiseptic and human. The room still smells of cold, he still smells sick and unwashed. The scents are muted, but he can get them. Deaton's is still off. "Doesn't smell right," and that is as much as he can say, glaring at them to make them understand, that something’s wrong, something has happened, that Deaton’s not Deaton— not the one he knows. He needs his questions answered, he needs to know where he is and what is going on.  
  
Deaton tries to move closer. Derek barres his teeth.  
  
"Okay, okay," Melissa again, "what should he smell like?"  
  
"Animals. Vet. Scott." Derek is panting by that point. He can hear his heartbeat in his ears, going too fast to keep what little oxygen he breathed in running through his body, to keep him conscious. He doesn't miss the frown and the incomprehension mirrored on the humans' faces.  
  
"Why would he smell like animals?"  
  
"Vet. He's the vet," he says, and why can they not _understand_ — and his hands twitch at the frustration when they should have made fists. He looks down at them, and they just shake on the floor. Derek shakes, uncontrollably.  
  
"What's going on?" Calls another voice, from the door— and Derek knows it, knows _him._ It’s Stiles at the door, his hair longer than Derek has ever seen it, his smell off too from what little Derek can smell from the other side of the room, his clothing strange, off-white.  
  
Melissa’s and Deaton’s clothing doesn’t look right either. They are not wearing anything close to scrubs, and Derek’s not wearing a hospital gown. Something’s wrong, something he knows. He can hear himself hyperventilate.  
  
It’s Stiles at the door and he’s looking at Derek down on the floor like he has never seen him before.  
  
+  
He hears his mother's voice, distorted in half-dreams until he opens his eyes and sees the cold room again. Six years, six years of guilt and grief, and his mother's voice, down the corridor beyond the open door, is saying "He's not my son. Yes, it's Derek, but that is not my son. I don't know who he is, or what, and until I have answers, the Hale Pack will have nothing to do with him."  
  
Surely he is still asleep. He has to be. It’s a nightmare, it has to be, a familiar one. The storyline is always the same: he hears his father, his mother and next, whoever is talking comes in, burned skin peeling off and yelling without end, that it’s his fault, all his fault and he sits there and waits until they burn him too.  
  
He starts choking on his breath. He needs— he needs to wake up, to get up, he has to see—  
  
His wrists are encased in leather cuffs on either side of the bed, limiting his movements. He tugs at them, testing their range, testing how much force he needs to break out of them. The answer is, more than he has at the moment. He feels his heart race, sweat beading at his temples.  
  
This is a nightmare. It has to be.  
  
The curse. It has to be the curse again, still. His thoughts feel clear for the first time since he woke up ‘here’. Except he never woke up, that’s what’s wrong, that’s what’s going on. He’s still dreaming, he’s in the mirror verse like Erica called it, and at anytime now it’s going to go back to his regularly scheduled torture. Dead Erica, dead Boyd, Isaac pushed away, Scott and Stiles not talking to him, Alpha pack at his heels, waiting for death to catch up to him and end it.  
  
He tugs and tugs and struggles and the sharp pain of the restrains digging in his skin, the sharp pain of hearing his mother's voice, clears his head further.  
  
A tug. The last time he saw Deaton was at the veterinary clinic, everyone filling the back room. A tug. He saw Scott after the warehouse, after Gerard. A tug. Jackson is a werewolf now. A tug. He talked with Scott, about his whole plan, the pills and the biting. He did so reluctantly, but he had. Scott hadn't apologized, not immediately. A tug. Erica and Boyd— he saw them, beaten and bruised and telling him that Chris Argent had let them go. Telling him that Gerard had used Stiles to get to Scott, to him. And then they had run into the wood and been the first victims of the curse that made them all fall asleep into a twisted reality one after the other. A tug. Derek remembers seeing Stiles, and Erica, and Boyd, in Mrs McCall’s kitchen, asking him to stop playing with crackers and just eat. A tug and a hiss, at the raw skin it brings. That’s where his memories stop, before waking up here. The last image he can’t place is a map, covered in marks and dates.  
  
He coughs, hard, but his thoughts are clearer than in days, or however long he has been here, wherever “here” is. The sole window of the room cuts a perfect square of light on the wall.  
  
He stops struggling against the restraints. There is very little in the room. A bed, a dresser whose drawers are shut, an open door to a bathroom, a chair, the bed he is on, the machines he is still plugged in. The second door, the one Not!Stiles came through, is shut. The cylinder of rabbit fur from earlier is by his leg, not quite far enough to not smell it _packpackpack_ and he knows that half of those scents have died years ago.  
  
He can’t hear his mother anymore. He strained his hearing, forced himself still and as silent as he could with air rattling under his breastbone. There was nothing else. Had he even heard her, or had it been another trick of his mind?  
  
This is not reality. Whatever happens, it’s not.  
  
He coughs, hard. He just has to wait. Wait it out.  
  
He can’t remember ever thinking, when he was under before, that it wasn’t reality. Only when he wakes up could he remember both and make the difference so this is… something else, or maybe another form of the djinn curse. An inception of sort, knowing you’re dreaming and still dreaming. He forces himself to breath slower, deeper. His ears are trained on what he can hear coming from the open door and the hallway behind it. He should hear more: people on the other side of the walls, kids and talking and traffic in the street below. He shudders a little. He’s too restrained to huddle properly under the blanket. He can't get warm. Having to deal with that too just adds to his general exhaustion and mental drag.  
  
He wonders where his body is, back in his reality.  
  
He keeps thinking about words that woke him up. They were words from the Alpha. Not his mother. The alpha put duty, safety of her pack and family first, even against its own members. He knew that. They had been intended to be heard.  
  
Wherever this was, his mother is alive and well and still Alpha of the Hale Pack and she wants nothing to do with him. He doesn't want to have anything to do with himself either, at the moment.  
  
He waits.  
  
Anytime now. He’ll take the regular mirror verse over this.  
  
He has no salt nor water left to spill.  
  
He can’t figure out when he falls asleep again. The window still cuts a perfect square of light when he opens his eyes, but half a wall away. The cuffs are still there around his wrists, but the raw skin is bandaged. He’s shivering from the cold, violently enough to hurt.  
  
+  
"Good news is, it's not the Plague. Bad news," and Deaton sighs then, "it's a curse."  
  
"Where is Derek then?" They looked at him strangely. He rolled his eyes in answer. " 'Your' Derek. Have we been swapped?"  
  
He didn't wish that on his other him— he wouldn't wish that on anyone, but his other him came from here, came from having his family, his world. Things were different, too different. Back, back to where Derek thought as his, he was on his own. He could acknowledge it, now, here. He had been on his own, he still was on his own, and he wished the Derek who had never learned to live without his world was not back there having to live his life.  
  
+  
He can't get warm. He can't no matter how much he tries, how many blankets and sweaters they bring him. He can feel it in his bones, now, how the building gets a few degrees cooler at night, the shifts from shadows to light. He finds himself chasing the light coming through the window, trying to stay in the sun-warmed spot as long as he can. But he can't get warm. It was probably a consequence of the nerve-damage of the curse.  
  
+  
He needed information, about this place, how things worked. There was curiosity, in some part, wanting to know where and when things had become different from what he knew.  
  
There were no computers that he had seen and he doubted there would be such a thing as an introductory text to this place, complete with comparisons with what he knew. That meant he'd have to talk to people. Contrary to what some might think (all his pack came to mind, minus Boyd, pang of something in his chest for missing them, all of them) he did talk to people, he did joke, he could be social. He just kept himself hidden. It was easier to give people what they wanted to see. Attracting too much attention, making people too interested in you, it led to annoyances, bad things at the worst; bad things like being made fugitive in your own town, every cop in the state with your mug shot. Beacon Hills got under his skin, made him sloppy; sloppier by the events and encounters and every single thing thrown his way.  
  
Too many people knew him here. Knew 'him', and revealing he knew nothing would bring more questions than answers.  
  
Stiles threw a tablet at Derek, one morning. "Here. Thanks Danny at the center for it."  
  
Derek learned about this world that way. It was easier than to ask people or hunt for answers on his own. The cities were roughly in same places, with different names. Beacon Hills was the half-way point on a trade route between San Francisco and further down south to up north to Vancouver-Seattle.  
  
Derek learned that near everyone had a tablet. That the economy was based on trade, that there was only 2 billions inhabitants on Earth, that skirmishes between factions were constant. Cars and flying apparatus were a novelty rather than the norm. In any other circumstances, he’d have been amused to have been dumped into a fantasy world.  
  
Any other circumstances.  
   
+  
He hadn't had the time to get used to the power being alpha brought. He hadn't yet gotten used to see red eyes looking back at him. Seeing his eyes glare blue was a comfort, somehow.  
  
He dragged a shaky thumb down the side of his face, acknowledging the sharpness there. He would need to shave, and maybe this time his hands would be able to grip things the right way and he would be steady enough to do it himself. He had lost power, and bulk, and steadiness. His skin looked grey, he looked younger, more tired, not like himself. And more like himself than ever.  
  
Maybe it wasn't his body. Maybe it was the one from this world's Derek. A Derek who didn't use push ups and pull ups and exercise to fill the emptiness and give a direction to the anger _guilthurt_. A Derek who was still solid, anchored down, who still had his family and a leader and something to follow.  
  
His tattoo was still there. The shadowy dip left by the bullet in his arm was still there. There was no difference. He was afraid that he had finally lost it, after a while. He didn't know what to believe, if this was the dream he had to wake up from, or if he hallucinated the whole universe he came from, being an alpha, the fire, Kate, his pack, living on the run with Laura, failing.  
  
+  
When he was allowed out, it was with an escort.  
  
[posturing group of a different faction on a bridge against group of apprentices Derek was walking with, ends in a fight. Stiles does his trick with mountain ash but one of the younger apprentice still falls in the water.]  
  
Derek didn't think, he just jumped after the girl. The water was cold to the point of freezing, and dark. He could see the dirty white jacket of the apprentice, drifting down further away from him. He swam after her, feeling the cold gnawing at his bones. Things got blurry, for a bit, from lack of oxygen, from a time with warmer water and a paralyzed body he was doing his best to not think about. Then he was taking a full breath of chilly and damp air, holding the girl's head above his. She wasn't moving.  
  
The other apprentices were on the shore, not far. They were moving like they were screaming, running along with the flow, not letting Derek and the girl out of their sight, but the noise they made was covered by the water's flow. Without the girl, and with his hands working right, he'd had been able to swim straight to the bank of the river. As it was, he had his arms wrapped around the girl, bobbling up and down through the current, trying to keep the shore in view by batting his legs. He couldn't stay in much longer: she wasn't a were, and a werewolf he might be, but he could feel every muscle starting to lock from the cold. The current was fast, fast enough that each kick he made pushed him closer diagonally to the bank. He fought the urge to let his teeth chatter, could feel his fingers getting number, his already weak grip slipping.  
+  
"Oh my god we were wrong your brain was completely deep-fried. Are you trying to kill yourself?!" Stiles was livid.  
  
"Not today," answered Derek, vaguely amused. He had seen Stiles holding in his reaction until they were all back in the hospital, until the girl —he still had no idea what her name was— had been taken care of and pulled out of danger, and until he had been dragged into a separate room.  
  
“What the fuck kind of answer is that? Stop moving, you dumbass— hypothermia is the absolute last thing you need, the wolfsbane’s mix has lowered your immune system’s responses, get off that shirt, off, off—“  
  
“Stop touching me—“  
  
Stiles kept babbling angrily, kept touching him, kept yelling “Are you trying to kill yourself?!"  
  
"Stop that! I am not fucking suicidal!"    
  
"Let us be the judges of that, okay! You're by nature social, you're a wolf, and you've just been cast out—"  
  
"That's not the first time, and here I know they are all alive."  
  
"Have you ever had suicidal ideations?"  
  
"For the last time— I'm not going to off myself."  
  
"You didn't answer my question."  
  
"Yes, okay, yes. Not anymore. Not in a while."  
  
"Oh dear gods, I knew it, we should have been on top of that weeks ago, I can get you in Doc Hank's office today—"  
  
"I am not going to kill myself!" He roared. Stiles finally, thankfully, stopped at the roar, staring at Derek. Derek in return looked away, eyes clenched shut, a hand curled on his thigh and his other hand pressing clumsily at his forehead, where there was the start of a dull ache. Headache, maybe. Like a beating heart under his skull, beating on full unlike the one inside his chest running on fumes. Hypothermia, they had said. He was feeling like he had been hit by a truck again, the impact going on and on and on, still impossible to get warmer by himself. Stiles screaming at him was helping nothing— this Stiles had no right to yell at him. "Are you done?" He had fought too hard and too long to keep on living to give up and off himself now, he had done too much to just give in and go easy into death. None of this would breach his lips— to this Stiles who knew nothing of him.  
  
He felt a pang in his chest. Here and now was not the time to realize he did trust the Stiles who had almost cut off his arm, who had hid him, who had kept him afloat in a pool, who with Erica had sat in a tiny bathroom talking him through a panic attack, that he could trust him to think and take decisions in the kind of situations they fell into. He tuned the angry Apprentice out, refused to answer the next questions.  
  
+  
  
[Laura comes to see Derek with meat in her teeth and still smelling like the blood of a hunt. They talk, and even if it’s a different universe, Derek finally unburdens his guilt, and bond with this Laura. Derek worries she's acting despite Alpha Hale's orders to stay away from him. Laura reveals that it's not the first time she acts without her mother’s agreement, and it’s certainly not the last. She hates that Derek has basically been cast out of the were circles, as social and familial isolation is not good for them. Derek tries to reassure her and to explains he’s used to it. It does not reassure her in the slightest.  
Laura gets him extra protective tattoos, two rows of five triangles with the points facing each other separated by a line, at the top of his thighs. The tattoo artist’s name is Gail and her tattoos are blue like Derek’s eyes and he thinks he’ll try to find her, on the other side.  
+  
Underlaying plot thread of that part is also that Derek, envoy of Alpha Hale as her third-born son, collapsed in the middle of the marketplace while returning from a caravan trade, and the event created minor panic. The Plague targets and kills only were and shifter, and is a known weapon of factions who want were and shifters gone.  
The Argents are part of a larger network of guardians and peacekeepers, and they are called in Beacon Hills because of Derek’s collapse. They come in at the hospital threatening to kill Derek, as he was cast out of Hale's pack and still present a risk of carrying the Plague. Sheriff Stilinski interferes, and so do Deaton, Melissa (and Laura). The Argents back off when the cause is revealed to be magical in nature but still remain in Beacon Hills.]  
  
+  
  
There are no warnings that Derek change places again.

* * *

[third part, mirrors the second in parts]  
  
+  
Derek feels off, like he’s just to the side of his body. That’s a familiar sensation now. Just moving his eyes under his lids hurts. That’s familiar, too.  
  
He lets out a long breath, half expecting it to rattle and shake under his breastbone. It does. He knows how to ride the coughing fit that follows, too.  
  
The room isn’t white when he opens his eyes. It doesn't smell of cold and white. It smells— he takes a deeper, careful breath, remembering all too well the hurt in his lungs and the coughing fits and generally being sick. It smells like Melissa, and Scott, and dust on wood. It smells like the hospital, a little, and like pack, and sun-warmed air. He hears a hiss of air; an instant later, it smells only of clean stale oxygen, pushed hard in his lungs.  
  
He’s warm.  
  
+  
  
“Don’t you remember?” Scott’s face falls a little when Derek shakes his head— it’s more of a limited rolling motion against his pillow.  
  
“We had a plan. We had… plans. We found who was responsible for the curse, and what they wanted, and— and I didn’t want to kill them. Isaac and Erica and Jackson got hurt, bad, and we had to leave, but the plan was to strike, so we did and you— we don’t know what happened to you. We were at the nemeton. Driving the Alpha pack and the Darach out was not going to work so… we killed them in the end. Chris and Allison and Lydia gave the last blow each time. And when it was finished and we were counting the bodies the Darach wasn’t there and you weren’t either.  
We looked everywhere you could be— Chris even called people from Oregon and Mexico, if they knew anything, had seen anything. We filed a missing person report, your face was on TV every night for a week. And then…” Scott got up, rubbing the sleeve of his shirt where his tattoo is hidden. “And then one night I opened my eyes and they were red.”  
  
When he turns back to look at Derek, immobile in bed, he can feel tears stinging his eyes. “We thought you were dead. We had— no other explanation. We stopped looking. Fuck, Derek, I’m so sorry, we stopped looking, we should have kept looking, you were still out there—“ Scott knows than a year ago, the kind of emotions that are threatening to overwhelm him at the moment would have sent him right into an asthma attack; more psychologically than physiologically, he starts to breath in the same strangled panting breaths asthma used to leave him with.  
  
Derek’s arm twitches, and raises from the bed just enough to reach Scott. “Don’t be stupid,” he says, the words cut short by heaving breaths.

It's still a reassurance.  
  
+  
When he looks in the mirror, he can see only himself. He drags a thumb down the side of his face, acknowledging the sharpness there, in plain sight, the sharpness of the bones exposed under the shaved skin of his head. He lost power, and bulk, and steadiness. His skin looks grey, he looks younger, more tired, not like himself, more like himself.  
  
He has kept the marks, the tattoos Laura has given him, made him get.  
  
Derek brushes his fingers on the top of his thighs, on the ink usually hidden under jeans. The contact barely tingles. The ink is faded, black turned indigo blue in places, far more than it should be for how recently (or not so recently) it was been done. There isn't much he can do about them, here and now. Retouching them would destroy the last of the protective magic intrinsic to the design and ink. Maybe he could find the tattoo artist here, Gail of the blue spirals.  
  
He can’t be mad about Laura pushing him into getting them anymore. Without them he'd have died, several times over. He knows they’ll keep him alive a bit longer.  
  
He’ll keep himself alive.  
  
+  
  
"Do you remember when Travis came back from Afghanistan?" The grease spotted paper beneath the Sheriff’s hands releases tantalizing smells of meat and fried things.  
  
“…Yeah?" says Stiles, giving the meal his father has chosen the stink eye. Then he refocuses on the conversation, looking up at his father.  
  
"Derek has the same look,” says the Sheriff, looking straight at him. “I’m not telling you to keep your distances, because god knows you wouldn’t listen to me about that, and with good reasons, but you need to be careful. And you need to be careful with him, and for him.”  
  
Stiles glares at his curly fries, then his shoulders slump. “I. Yeah. It’s— We left him. We left him, dad, and now a ton of shit happened and it’s. I don’t even wanna think about how hard this is for him, and I have no idea where to start.”  
  
+  
  
[In the first few days of Derek "being back", Melissa finds him huddled in the corner of the room he's staying in. Derek can't recognize where he is. He thinks he's still in the alternate universe, and can't make the difference between that Melissa McCall and the one who is in front of him. He's, however, very careful to not hurt her —he only hurts himself, and even so accidentally (he wasn’t ready to be out of bed).  
  
When he wakes up the first few times, he confuses Allison for Laura. He doesn't remember it, has to be told later.  
  
The Sheriff’s department is in the know of the supernatural, they are the ones to find Derek in a deserted warehouse, where he had been left for an unknown length of time. Derek is brought to the hospital, Melissa is there and calls the pack and Deaton. Derek is unconscious, wounded, severely dehydrated (which cause seizures as he's brought in), has decreased respiratory functions (due to the curse—has to be on ventilator for a short time). Derek is brought to McCall's house as his situation improve faster than it should and they can't hide it. Deaton provides a cover for it. When there was no-one from the pack or the families to stay with him at the house, there was a volunteer of the Sheriff’s department. Thankfully he doesn't wake up when there's one of them. Derek comes close to waking a couple times when Isaac and Boyd are there, the pack takes turns looking for him, Scott never wants him alone just in case. Derek wakes up with his hair and face shaved: he was "gone" for about three months, and the wounds on his head (lacerations and broken bones consistent by injuries inflicted by blunt force trauma, bat or pipe or Alpha hands) had to be treated.  
  
Derek is able to shift to full wolf after his ordeal. The full shift was one of the reasons he was taken by the Alpha pack and the Darach—Deucalion wanted the shift to full wolf and the power— but it needs to be given. Killing Derek would not have given Deucalion that power, and Derek didn't even know he could do it. The ultimate goal of the allied Alpha pack and Darach was to take over Beacon Hills by killing the guardians (the Hale pack) and then taking the power of the Nemeton.  
  
Derek retreats to his house, to deal with the set of new memories and to deal with events, and also because if Scott's the alpha of the pack, he's not the alpha anymore and not needed anymore (or so he thinks). He’s a quiet man—but after all this, he becomes a silent one.  
  
Stiles takes Derek to a diner. Derek’s hunched and slouched inside a canvas jacket. His body issues come back to the forefront, the trip to alternate universe cracks open his capacities for compartmentalization.  
Stiles POV: "Derek wasn't that much taller and larger than he was. He just appeared to be. He seemed to make himself look taller and larger— except he wasn't, right now."  
  
The end is Derek building a cabin by himself on foundations laid for a garden shed that was torn down before the fire. The legend says it was the original cabin built by his great-great grandfather. He builds a cabin and he rebuilds himself and the pack is a constant presence.  
  
"I'm aware of my own coping mechanisms. I need— to prove to myself I can do things— I can still do things by myself.”] 


	5. Turning Derek Human

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What it says on the tin, post s3b: Kate comes in the loft and shoot Derek, but leaves him there. To keep him alive, the werewolf part of him has to be "used up."
> 
> post season 3, human Derek Hale, pack family, canon-typical violence, hospital

  
They would, at some point, admit that it was a thing. Lydia uncrossed her legs to recross them the other way, heeled shoe dangling just so under her book of astrophysics. She’d been reading the same page for two hours. Stiles, sitting where the part-time secretary usually sat behind the mountain ash counter, was staring in the middle distance, occasionally looking up across the room to glance at her. Kira, in the back with Scott and Deaton, had been completely silent for an entire hour. Scott and Deaton were sticking to veterinarian work talk.  
  
They couldn’t stand being apart, but once together there was nothing they could say.  
  
It had been fifteen days since Allison was killed, fourteen since Stiles was freed from the Nogitsune, fourteen since Aiden died, eight since Allison’s funeral. Chris Argent left four days ago, Isaac went with him without talking to any of them. Ethan left the next day, his brother’s ashes with him and Danny knowing.    
  
Malia had enrolled ten days ago, the new girl in school, still animal in her human clothes.  
  
Kira had gone home only a handful of time since. She had clothes at all of their houses. Lydia understood the need to get some distance— she would, too, if the distance didn’t need to be from the inside of her own head.  
  
They saw Derek a couple times. She didn’t think he was okay. She didn’t think she had all the informations about what happened while Stiles wasn’t himself. Much more than she knew of had went on, she was sure of it. Scott didn’t want to talk about it, any of it, be it the Nogitsune, Allison or what else was going on in Beacon Hills during those events. He instead drove himself ragged keeping them together.  
  
Stiles still barely slept. Barely said anything meaningful. Lydia caught him counting his fingers every hour, every other day.  
  
It was what he was doing when Deaton’s phone rang. His fingers stilled when Deaton laid out the situation in a few words, asking Scott and Kira to clean up and close, telling her and Stiles they needed to come with him to the hospital. That Derek had been shot. That Derek was poisoned, possibly dying. The flurry of activity that happened next—  
  
She didn’t remember the ride to the hospital, but she remembered the disjointed discussion between Stiles and Deaton. She didn’t remember what Deaton said, what the ER nurses said, but she followed Deaton in the corridors like any of them had any right to be there. She didn’t remember scrubbing up, but she remembered the smell of the soap, harshly clean in her nose.  
  
Lydia found bodies. She hadn’t wanted to know more about what she was, not right now— it felt like a door wide open she’d never be able to shut behind her if she did. And maybe it was childish, and irresponsible, and many many other adjectives, but she was still a teenager, they all were. Stupid decisions came with the territory, it was the one decision she could still have a say on.  
  
She found bodies, and she knew she was more connected to death than that. She’d seen rigor mortis and putrefaction and dismemberment and burned corpses, and while it followed her in dreams, those weren’t threats. There was a comfort in knowing what would come.  
  
Derek looked pale like death in the operating room, face framed by green scrubs and breathing tube. Livor mortis set immediately after death, she thought, but similar states could be created by shock in living beings. There was black and red blood everywhere. Stiles held her hand. His was shaking.  
  
Standing by Derek’s prone body in the stark operating room seemed like a clinical mockery of a wake.  
  
Something else was going on, her throat itching around a scream, and the hand Stiles held was going numb. She tightened her grip.  
  
She knew she lost time when Stiles called her name— not for the first time.  
  
“Yes,” she said, and she did not remember what she said yes to. Stiles held her hand tighter, warmer, and a disorienting moment that felt like slipping into the Nogistune mind again later, all there was to see in the room were lights.  
  
They were a circuit, a closed system feeding in and of itself. She could see colors she had never seen, smelled fear and determination, saw herself through red eyes, saw Stiles through the night. There was a bright ember in the middle of the colors and scents, bright but blinking. Her—Stiles—their hand cupped it, every move a shower of sparks, casting lights in the dark hidden parts of this center—  
  
It was heavy, hard, and the ember in the star-hand burned brighter, brighter— supernova in a palm— supernova shed the outer layers of their gas envelops at the same time their core collapsed, a desperate attempt to keep burning, gaining a few millions years of life out of a last song brighter than a galaxy lasting for the blink of an eye—  
  
Derek needed to live.  
  
The ember collapsed on itself in a rain of sparks. Every suddenly bright piece of life zigzagged through the dark like electrical impulses through a brain.  
  
She heard the people in the operating room talk and shout. She heard the wailing siren of an ambulance, nothing like her scream, announcing life and not death. She heard electricity, ozone, Stiles’ voice.  
  
She heard Derek’s heart, strong and sure.    
  
+  
  
“He’s in the ICU.”  
  
“Mom, is he—“  
  
Melissa raised a hand. “Scott,” she started. Stiles, Lydia and Kira were there too, in the corridor, and by their looks they had been there for hours. For probably five and a half hours, the time Derek Hale had spent in surgery. “All of you,” she continued. “Come with me.”  
  
She led them to the family waiting area. The chairs were more comfortable. Melissa sat facing them, Scott and Stiles’ legs were touching, Kira’s hand was next to Scott’s, Lydia’s arm was around Stiles’. There should have been two more sitting here— there should have been three and none of them should have been sitting in an hospital waiting room.  
  
“How soon can we see him?” Stiles asked.  
  
“The ICU is family only. I can’t help any of you sneak up there, not with a deputy at his door. It’s a murder and attempted murder investigation.” She emphasized _murder_ , twice. Maybe one day it would get through their head that their world was more violent than they realized.  
  
Allison’s absence was glaring.  
  
“Can’t we say we’re family? Scott’s his alpha, it’s like family—“ Stiles said, rearing up for a lot of fast talk.  
  
“Stiles, there’s— he won’t be awake before tomorrow at the soonest. While I do agree that pack is family, the rest of the hospital staff won’t be quite as lenient.” Melissa took a breath, gathering her thoughts. “He lost a lot of blood, and bleed internally too. The shot broke his sternum, which sent pieces of bones in his heart, lungs and diaphragm on top of the buckshots. Whatever you guys did,” and she looked at Stiles and Lydia, paler than they should have been, “you saved his life. His heart was in better shape than it should have been when the surgery began, and it held.”  
  
Melissa had worked at the Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital for over ten years. Every hunting season, accidents came through— birdshot and buckshot in the legs, the arms. Every year they lost someone from a shot in the guts, the chest. The type of injuries Derek had sustained should have killed him, would have killed him if he had received medical assistance only minutes later.  
  
“The surgery removed the pieces and shots, aspired the blood, posed a chest tube to deal with the collapsed lung. His breathing is going to be impaired until he heals, and he is currently on a mechanical ventilator to ease the strain on his system. When you see him, once, and only once he’s out of the ICU, he’s going to be in a lot of pain— and depending on how his condition develops in the next 24 hours, he may have to be put under medical coma.”  
  
“Why isn’t he now?”  
  
“And do normal drugs even work with werewolves? Aren’t they like, super-resistant?”  
  
Lydia frowned, looking in the distance. Melissa ignored Scott’s and Stiles’ questions, as she didn’t have the answers that would satisfy them.  
  
“Lydia? Honey, are you feeling alright?”  
  
“We made a supernova.”  
  
All eyes were on her.  
  
“Lydia?” asked Kira. “What are you talking about?”  
  
“Supernova. In the evolution of a star, after all the hydrogen and helium burn, the higher temperatures needed to burn denser elements are achieved through the collapse of the core and the ejection of the outer envelop. The result is a flash so bright it can be seen in daylight if it happens close enough from the observation point. A swan song.”  
  
Stiles stared at her, his face losing color, reaching the same conclusion as her. Kira and Scott grabbed each other’s hand.  
  
“We saved Derek,” Lydia continued, ignoring the tears rolling from her eyes. “We saved Derek by burning out his werewolf spark from him.”  
  
+  
Melissa forced them out. In the corridor, the colors looked even more washed out. The four kids looked like shadows of themselves. Stiles had barely recovered from the possession —how could he have, it only had been two weeks— and Melissa knew he still wasn’t sleeping well. The dark circles under his eyes and under Lydia’s could be the stress of the last weeks, could be the consequences of whatever they had done to save Derek’s life. Scott and Kira weren’t looking much better. All Melissa knew about the newest addition to the pack was that she was barely staying at her parents’ house, choosing to hop from house to house with the rest of them, never alone. She didn’t know if Derek had been included in the rotations. She hadn’t seen Isaac in two weeks, hadn’t heard anything from Chris Argent.    
  
They were kids. They were all just kids.  
  
“We want to stay,” said Scott. The three others had their back to them, a parody of privacy.  
  
“No. Not today, Scott. You all have school in four hours and you’ve missed enough days as it is. I will,” Melissa said, cutting through whatever Scott was about to reply, “I will call if there is any change, and I will keep an eye on Derek until my shift is over. But you all need a break, out of here.”  
  
Scott was stared up at her. Melissa shook her head.  
  
“Take the car and bring everyone home. Take the mattress from the guest bedroom, there’s enough space in your room to put it there.”  
  
Scott hugged her. “Thanks mom.”  
  
She hugged back. “It’s not a sleepover. You need rest,” and she was looking at Stiles when she said so.  
  
Scott added two taps to his hug, like he knew what she was talking about and acknowledged it.  
  
+  
Derek had incomplete medical records and paperwork listing his next of kin. It said Laura and Peter Hale, one with a New York address, the other a resident of Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital.  
  
Melissa took his paperwork to the Sheriff after her shift was over. At the end of the day, the next of kin were saying Melissa McCall, Beacon Hills, and Andrzej Stilinski, Beacon Hills.  
  
Derek’s stats were good enough by the end of the day that he was allowed to be moved from the recovery room slash intensive care unit to his own private room with a deputy at the door —it had been Parrish when she’d left. Derek had given signs of trying to wake up more than once, had tried to cough the ventilator out a couple times. Melissa relayed the information to the pack when they got out of class, letting them know that they were allowed to come during visiting hours. All four names were on a list of restricted access, only vetted by the Sheriff. They all remembered how Matt, then the alpha pack had infiltrated the hospital.  
  
When she left her shift, went through the routine of grocery and errands, and returned home to finally sleep, the mattress from the guest room was still in Scott’s room, blankets folded and pillows fluffed.  
  
+  
There were three rounds of samples tested, to make sure. Two days after Derek was shot in his loft, two days after Lydia and Stiles saved his life using abilities they did not know they had, two days after he was admitted to the hospital, two days after which he still hadn’t woken up fully, they were sure.  
  
Derek’s results had came back normal— human normal. They tested negative to the lycanthropy markers, failed to react to wolfsbane in the expected ways.  
  
Deaton had called Melissa, had called the Sheriff. It was news bigger than them, bigger than they could imagine. Deaton talked them through what he could only say were speculations at this point, until Derek was awake and able to tell them what was wrong with him. He threw around loss of visual acuity, of sense of smell, of hearing, lowered physical strength, weakened immune system. The shift would be gone, and so would the physical signs of it; claws, fangs, flashing eyes. He had no idea how Derek would react mentally to the changes, hinting at the possibility of denial, depression, post-traumatic stress.  
  
Derek was alive. He wasn’t a werewolf anymore.  
  
+  
“Stiles.”  
  
Stiles didn’t bother raising his head from the edge of the bed it was resting on. “Yeah, dude?”  
  
“… we should bring him stuff.”  
  
“Like what?”  
  
“I dunno. It’s just. Too white and hospital-y, you know?”  
  
“Yeah dude, I know. We should find him a blanket.”  
  
“Yeah. One with cute kittens. Or Carebears.”  
  
“He could be a Carebear. Sort of. I can totally see him shoot glitter, rainbows and happiness out of his abs.”  
  
Scott snorted. “I’ll tell him you said that.” The discussion lapsed. Derek needed to be awake to hear about Carebears. Stiles would have added that it was too silent in addition to be too hospital-y, except it wasn’t really, between the heart monitor and the mechanical ventilator and the elevator outside and the people— the people outside in the corridor and blood and what would it be this time? Alpha, kanima, evil druid, another demon, possessing someone else?  
  
“He’s going to want socks,” said Stiles, to cut the rambling of his thoughts. “Mom— she always wanted socks. It’s too cold, y’know?”  
  
“You think Lydia and Kira are out of the mall yet?”  
  
“You’d ask Lydia for socks?”  
  
Scott shrugged, not seeing what Stiles was shocked about. Stiles gesticulated, only one hand in motion but looking like his entire body was behind the action. “It’s Lydia. She’d find the most expensive pair of socks at Macy’s, spun from the tears of silkworms and alpacas. It’d be too tasteful and expensive to just touch, let alone use.”  
  
Scott smiled.  
  
+  
“Am I… awake?” were Derek’s first words under the oxygen mask that had replaced the medical ventilator. Stiles didn’t hear him —too low— but Scott did.  
  
“Derek!”  
  
“Am I awake?” he repeated, and Stiles heard him, heard himself, heard words sliding down pages and the rasp of moving bandages. “Fingers…?”  
  
“Derek, what are you talking about?”  
  
But Derek’s eyes, just a sliver of hazel, were fixated on Stiles. Like Stiles knew what he was talking about. Like Stiles could hear his thoughts. He almost could, dream within a dream within a dream. Stiles swallowed, took his hands out of his pockets. “See?” He spread his fingers, wiggled them. “All ten. You’re awake.”  
  
Derek closed his eyes. A heartbeat later, he opened them again— the heart monitor accelerated its rhythm. “She’s back,” he said, his eyes on both of them. They didn’t seem to be focusing properly. With the amount of drugs in his veins, they were surprised Derek was coherent at all.  
  
He kept repeating it, “she’s back, she’s back,” and shaking, and sweating from pain and exhaustion, as the doctor and nurses came in, as the deputy at the door —a new guy, no Parrish today— radioed the Sheriff’s station, as Scott and Stiles were asked out.  
  
He kept repeating it, over and over and over again, as Scott and Stiles stayed in the corridor and waited.  
  
The repeated words only stopped when Derek was sedated.  
  
+  
Melissa’s gloved fingers tapped the gauze back to his chest lightly. Derek kept his eyes on the ceiling, refusing to even catch a glimpse of the flesh and stitches hidden underneath. He’d see them soon enough.  
  
“Anything else?” She asked, “and I do mean anything.”  
  
He had scared Scott and Stiles, he knew, had scared everyone. He still wasn’t sure he was awake, couldn’t remember _waking up_ the day before. Melissa and the doctors had assured him it was normal, that the painkillers he was receiving by IV and the general anesthesia he had went through for the surgery and the trauma of being shot were known variables inducing amnesia. It could have been brain damage from the blood he had lost too, they had said, but the cognitive tests had came back normal.  
  
Normal, normal, and all he could think about was grabbing Stiles’s hand and seeing six fingers and waking up on the floor of his loft to see Kate shifting in front of him. Kate Argent, alive.  
  
The deputy who had taken his statement had asked him to repeat that two times, and seemed to believe the drugs were keeping him in lala land.  
  
If the others —the others: Scott, Stiles, Lydia, Kira, Melissa, Deaton and the Sheriff now, the group’s numbers dwindling day after day— believed it was the action of the drugs, they didn’t say it to his face. They didn’t say they believed him, either.  
  
There was always someone around— one of the deputies at the door, or Scott, Stiles, Lydia, and Kira in the room. He wanted to be comforted by it, pack taking care of pack and the heartbeats familiar, but he couldn’t hear them anymore, couldn’t smell them. He could just see them, and just barely.  
  
“Everything’s blurry.” His words were muted, hazy. Half of it was the nasal cannula that had replaced the mask, half of it was not being able to hear even himself correctly. Sounds were flat now.  
  
Melissa frowned a little. “Blurry how? Is it a haze over your eyes or is it blurry only in certain places?”  
  
Derek blinked, squinted his eyes at her. “I can see you, but anything around—“ he pointed at the closed door for a second before his hand fell back limply on the bed, “there, going through or that far, it’s colors, not details.”  
  
“Let me,” Melissa leaned over him, shining light in his eyes. “Did you have any relatives with vision problems?” That close, he should have smelled her, should have smelled only that. He could guess there was a faint scent of shampoo now, nothing else.  
  
“Not that— that I can remember.” His few humans relatives had been older, but he couldn’t recall glasses. Couldn’t recall much without flinching from the memories of faces. It was harder to escape when he could barely move, barely think.  
  
He had to blink to get rid of the lingering lights in his eyes.  
  
“I’ll see how soon I can get you into an optometry appointment.”  
  
“How soon can I get out?”  
  
She looked away, sat down on the closest chair. “You had surgery five days ago, and—“ her hand waved at him, like it was enough to say that he wasn’t a werewolf anymore, that no-one knew how to go from there, “—major trauma, you need rest and to be monitored. And that’s not counting the physical therapy.”  
  
“I’m a target here.”  
  
Her lips flattened against each other. “I’m not letting you go out there alone to get hunted down.”  
  
He stared at her, the green of her scrubs more vivid than he could remember green to be. “Word goes out, and I’ll be hunted down regardless.” _I don’t want to get more people hurt_ , he didn’t add. Melissa would hear it— she knew about taking risks, putting people other than herself first. She was a mother, she was a fighter. She clearly hated the idea of letting him walk out.  
  
“I’m calling in a full allergy test, then your first round of vaccines. I won’t let you out without at least some protection.”  
  
Vaccines wouldn’t be much use against bullets and knives, but he nodded in answer anyway. Derek didn’t want Melissa angry at him.  
  
She patted his arm when she left, and the brief physical contact kept him going for the rest of the day. He focused on that rather than the weakness in his limbs and the empty hurt in his chest, until exhaustion dragged him down again.  
  
+  
Stiles didn’t wake with a shout. He knew how, now, got practice. Too much, if he was honest with himself, and —he looked at his alarm clock— 3.46am was a pretty good time to be honest. He groaned, knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep more, his fingers, all ten of them, drumming on his thighs. It was getting easier to wake up, and to know the difference between awake and dreaming, but he was still scared of sleeping, of spending his nights inside his own head.  
  
There was still a door ajar and dark. Asking Deaton had led only to cryptic answers only Scott was happy with. Stiles gritted his teeth, hard enough to hurt, to distract himself. Then he snapped the rubber band around his wrist twice.  
  
There was some noise from downstairs, he realized. He got up, got out of his room. The noises were coming from the living room— the kitchen lights were on. He still stubbed his big toe on the chair serving as coat rack in the hallway, let out a muffled curse.  
  
Derek was sitting stiffly on the couch, a pillow pressed to his chest, a blanket around him. The TV was showing an idyllic sun and beach combo.  
  
“Hey,” Stiles said.  
  
“Hey,” Derek said. He didn’t turn his head away from the screen. He hadn’t turned away when Stiles’s toe had meet the chair either. he wasn’t wearing his glasses.  
  
Stiles considered that enough warning given, and he padded inside the room, sat down on the couch —there was just enough space for him.  
  
“What are you watching?” he asked after the beach changed to a cityscape, the narrator announcing names of restaurants and their rankings.  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
They kept watching. Stiles would have glanced at Derek once in a while, but he knew what Derek looked like: paler than he should have been and paler for the wash of the screen light, dark rings around his eyes from pain and not being able to sleep, his hands and feet too cold, trying to hide in blankets and against pillows, human. Human in ways he should have never looked like.  
  
“You wanna watch Star Wars?”  
  
When Sheriff Stilinski went home, he found the TV screen frozen on the Battle of Hoth, his son and Derek asleep on the couch under the same blanket.  
+  
  
  



	6. Magic Practitioneer Derek

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek's a Wolf-Witch, as if he didn't have enough problems in canon.
> 
> suicidal thoughts, magical Derek Hale, magic

+

 It was when they made it to New York that he felt it for the first time. He was high up, in the corner of the floor, and there were nothing but windows in front of him. It was not so high that he couldn’t see down below, that he was on top of the building— he wondered, what it would be like, at the very top. Would there be wind? Would it be cold? Would he hear anything coming from down below?  
          
He looked down, his hand splayed wide on the glass, as wide as it can. It would leave a mark, until the next time it was cleaned, temporary imprint of passage. The streets looked like it didn’t belong, toy-like people and cars passing and pausing and keeping on going, and he was there above, immobile.  
          
He wondered, what it would be like, to jump.  
          
Would he fly?  
          
He contemplated the idea.  
          
Would it hurt? At the very, very end, would he feel anything?  
          
_L’appel du vide_ , his cousin had called it. She had refused to translate, and the sounds had called him inside a little. His french had gotten better for it. The call of the void, it meant, the low, instinctive urge to jump that pooled in your belly and tugged down when faced with emptiness.  
          
It wasn’t empty, beyond the windows. But it was empty inside him. Did it count? Faced with the emptiness within, was that _l’appel du vide_ too?  
          
Derek Hale contemplated jumping, in New York, contemplated opening a window and see if he could fly, if only for an instant, if it would hurt, if only for an instant, contemplated answer the call of the emptiness within.  
          
He was sixteen.  
          
The next day, he met his first teacher.    

+  
  
He gets held down in Nowhere, New Mexico while his left hand was lowered into a jar full of snakes, and he spends the next three days in agonizing pain, the next three lost in the desert-steppe and hallucinating roads and ways and paths and dehydrated. They had called it a Search, but seeing their faces when he made his way back, covered in dust and scratched and bleeding and the smell of sweat and vomit clinging to his clothes, even through the haze of exhaustion and seeing things that had no right to be there, he suspected it was another attempt to kill him under the cover of training him to be less of a danger to himself and others. They train him, after that— they give him the basics. They also give him a blanket and make him sleep outside. The sky was full of paths.  
  
No coyote came to him, but he knows he got on the radar of some of the spirits of the Southwest. There is music and laughter when he Walks, often at the limit of his awareness. He doesn’t think all of them are good, as far as good and bad and those flawed human conception can be applied to spirits and magic (and even himself). There are many stories about wolves and shifters and bad witches all rolled into one in the southwest. He’s considered less than a dog here.  
  
There’s a year he remembers fondly, when he’s hired to live in and take care of a cabin at the edge of Midwest and Northeast. He barely made enough money (deposed in cash every two weeks to a PO box in the nearest town) to cover gas and water and food, but there wasn’t much else he needed. There was no running water or electricity or phone line up there, just a wood stove, miles of land covered in dense forest and the rare trail. The owner wanted to keep the cabin, but it needed to be kept in good conditions— all the repairs, Derek send a letter with what was going on and an estimate of the cost of the materials, the money in cash was added to his bimothly total. Laura didn’t know where he was— he didn’t know if she asked. He only sent her one letter, a couple months before he left that place.  
  
He’s terrified of the pack in Beacon Hills and of the bonds forming there— if they knew what he was, they wouldn’t even acknowledge his existence— but that was the whole thing, pups so new and so isolated they knew nothing of how their community worked. West was laxer than East on this. Scott treated him like— an older authority figure he had no need of, not like a monster whose very existence should have been erased, someone their community had no name for, only death.  
  
After the fire, after he is outed as a wolf-witch, Derek’s existence disappeared. He was not a person anymore. Laura barely talked to him, barely acknowledged he exists. She had tried not to, at first, but she was an Alpha albeit one without a pack, and she couldn’t make waves lest the alphas in New York who have given them shelter take offense and drive them out of the city or kill them or force her to give up the power.  
  
Derek learns spanish from his first teacher in Brooklyn. That’s all he speaks in New Mexico, the syllables tumbling precariously from his lips when he can speak at all. He knows a bit of French from high school, but it’s useless to him to understand Cajun— so he learns Cajun, and then French. The mixed pack, half coven and half pack that hosts him in Pine Prairie gets their kicks from the way he talks. They treat him like a part of their group, while he’s there, teaching him to cook and nagging at him to eat more and being incredibly patient, praising him on what little progress he does. It’s a good memory. He hoards those preciously. They stops all contact when the Lady of New Orleans takes an interest in him.  
  
She’s strict, the Lady of New Orleans. Strict and intimidating and a natural leader with a commending presence, and those who follow her follow her half by love, half by fear. She reminds him of his mother.  
  
They call him a Walker. It’s information, it’s all just information and ghosts. He can use some rituals and some incantations, some summoning and he can be a conduit for higher spirits— and really he shouldn’t use any of it, he’s still just an apprentice and realistically he’ll remain one all his life however long or short it happens to be. No-one wants to see a wolf-witch with fully realized powers.  
  
He knows Others are watching him. Others, not humans, not supernaturals. Perhaps they were both or either, or had never been either. He could hear them sometimes, see them out of the corner of his eyes. He knew some of their names, the ones everyone knew, but he took care to not say them out loud and to not look for their other names. It was a bad idea to attract attention, and names had a power he couldn’t completely understand.  
  
Laura’s last words to him were: “I’m going back to Beacon Hills, and I do not need _you_ to come with me.” She hung up immediately after.  
          
When Derek found her body in the Preserve, he wondered if that was what she had wanted, in the end; she wasn’t the Alpha of their crumbling pack anymore, she didn’t have to hide that he was her brother anymore, and the alpha’s power handed down from Hale to Hale wasn’t his.  
          
He takes great care to write everything down. It’s an habit his first teacher taught him, and he never stopped. Too soon after her, writing things down was the only way he had to express his thoughts and discoveries. No-one wanted to talk to him. All his notes are in a mix of several languages and symbols his teacher refused to call witch symbols. The mixed pack in Louisiana gave him codes they didn’t use anymore, and enough knowledge of cajun to be written down. 

Derek writes down everything in jumbled messes of thoughts, sketches, explosions of emotions. Then he takes the time to transcribe everything in leather-bound journals. He can’t afford to forget anything of his life. There’ll be another wolf-witch, one day. Maybe there is another one alive at the same time, right now. And maybe they’ll find his journals and it’ll help, and they won’t have to go through the isolation and anger of being the only one in a hostile world.  
  
Derek is still an apprentice, after five years. He has learned from many people, from books, book smart and educated, learned basic paramedic skills too.  
He’s learned to sleep without a sound, and to stay awake far longer than he should, and when he should stop and listen to the paths’ whispering and when to hide.  
  
In Beacon Hills, it all comes to an end—the hiding and the pretending. Of course it does. There are hunters—different from the Argents, and there’s a smell like a memory on the wind and the pack has no idea, none, what it means when he volunteers to Walk to get info on the latest threat in Beacon Hills. Deaton is surprisingly neutral about the whole thing. The pack—pups so new they have no idea of the community they belong to—can’t stop asking questions.  
  
Lydia asks him to teach her, her who scream for death. Derek is reluctant, having only talked to the real dead once, an experience in New Mexico when he was half-dead himself. He ends up talking about his teachers and that experience to her, glossing over it mostly. Lydia is not fooled by the glossing over, she sees that something’s very wrong, very wrong indeed.  
  
He shrugs, and waits for their eyes to turn to stone and fear. Magic is not good or bad, it just is. Derek’s not good or bad, he just is. He just exists on an edge.  
  



End file.
